Exporting Voting Results

Voting service has the support for exporting voting results to external data storage.

The contents of this topic:

• Exporting to file
• Exporting to database
• Voting Setup dialog - Export tab

Exporting to file

SMS Studio writes the complete set of voting results to the file specified by the user.

The file is overwritten each time an export occurs. The external application, which reads the file, should be aware that it will not be able to access the file at the short period of times when the file is being updated.

The voting results are written in the form of tab-delimited text table. Each line in the text file includes the following data:

• ID - The ID of the answer.
• Answer - The name of the answer.
• Votes - The current number of votes of the answer.
• Rank - The current rank of the answer.
• Percentage - The number of votes represented as percentage.
• TimeID - The TimeID value of the voting results set.

At the time of exporting, the whole set of voting results is written to the file. To allow external applications to learn the time when the update has been completed, SMS Studio assigns a TimeID value to all the records in the set. The TimeID value contains the time in the following form: yyyyMMddHHmmss.

Exporting to database

SMS Studio writes the complete set of voting results to the table specified by the user.

At the time of exporting, the whole set of voting results is written to the table. To allow external applications to distinguish between different sets of voting results, SMS Studio assigns a unique TimeID value to all the records in one set. The TimeID value contains the time at which the set has been exported in the following form: yyyyMMddHHmmss.

The table for voting results should have the following fields:

• TimeID - The TimeID value of the voting results set.
• ID - The ID of the answer.
• Answer - The name of the answer.
• Votes - The current number of votes of the answer.
• Rank - The current rank of the answer.
• Percentage - The number of votes represented as percentage.

Once the set is written to the database, SMS Studio updates the Status table. This table keeps the record of the last completely written set in the voting results table. The Status table should have the following fields:

• TableName - The name of the table from the database.
• LastTimeID - The time ID value of the last set written to the table.

For example, if a table used for exporting is named Voting, the proper reading of the latest voting results would be like this:

SELECT Answer, Votes
FROM Voting
WHERE TimeID = ( SELECT LastTimeID
                 FROM Status
                 WHERE TableName = 'Voting' )

Voting Setup dialog - Export tab

Exporting options

• Type lets you select the method for exporting voting results. Type may have the following values:

• None - Do not export voting results.

• ODBC Data Source - Export voting results to a database through ODBC interface.

• Text file - Export voting results to a text file.

• Period lets you specify the time interval at which voting results will be exported. If set to never, then no automatic exporting will be done, user will need to use Tools - Export Results option from the Voting Inbox dialog to manually export voting results.

ODBC Data Source

• Data Source lets you specify the name of the Data Source to be used for exporting.
• User name specifies the user name for connecting to the Data Source.
• Password specifies the password for connection to the Data Source.
• Table name lets you specify the name of the table the service will use to export voting results.

Text file

• File name lest you select the file to which voting results will be exported. Use selection button ( ... ) to browse for a file.