Custom thank you dialog in a Survey

How to create a custom thank you dialog in a SharePoint 2010 survey

This blog post describes how to create a custom thank you dialog for all your SharePoint 2010 Surveys. The solution is implemented by the use of Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. I have found many blog posts and questions in forums on this matter, but none of them seems to have a solution that works on a multiple paged survey with validation.

This solution works on a multiple paged survey with OOTB validation!

1) Create custom survey list definition

This is described in step 1 of this blog post: Lillebuen IT blog post: Hide Save and Close button in Survey

2) Create an item event receiver  for the list

• Right click on the list definition folder in Visual Studio
• Choose Add > New Item...
• Choose Even Receiver and give the event receiver a name, e.g. MyEventReceiver
• In the customization wizard:
• Choose List Item Event
• Choose your survey list definition (MySurvey)
• Check "An item is being added" and "An item is being updated"
• Add code to display a dialog after the invoking the base methods

The Item event receiver shall look like this:

namespace Namespace.ListDefinitions.MySurvey.MyEventReceiver
{
    public class MyEventReceiver: SPItemEventReceiver
    {
        private readonly HttpContext _currentContext;
        public SurveyListReceiver()
        {
            if (HttpContext.Current != null)
            {
                _currentContext = HttpContext.Current;
            }
        }
        private void DisplayConfirmationMessage()
        {
            if (_currentContext != null)
            {
                _currentContext.Response.Write(
                    "<script type='text/javascript'>alert('We have received your answers. Thank you for your participation.');</script>");
            }
        }
        public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
        {
            base.ItemAdding(properties);
            try
            {
                DisplayConfirmationMessage();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // error handling code
            }
        }
        public override void ItemUpdating(SPItemEventProperties properties)
        {
            base.ItemUpdating(properties);
            try
            {
                DisplayConfirmationMessage();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // error handling code
            }
        }
    }
}

I have tried displaying the Thank you text in a SharePoint:UI:Dialog, but I haven't figured out how. It seems like I cannot add script references when doing it like this. Please tell me if anyone have a solution to this.

The reasons for implementing it like this are many:

• There are many blog posts suggesting that the PreSaveAction javascript method can be invoked, but this method is invoked before the OOTB survey validation. A dialog saying thank for your response, with a survey containing errors is quite stupid.
• Others suggest setting the Source in the URL. This works perfectly on a survey with one page. But when a survey contains more than one page, the survey generates more than on response per actual End User response and the thank you page never shows...
• I have also tried doing a redirect in the methods above, but this will cancel the event.
• I have also tried doing a redirect in the ItemAdded and ItemUpdated methods instead, but this is not possible since these methods are asynchronously, itemAdding and itemUpdating however are synchronously.