There are lots of controls packed with .NET which we can use in building our ASP.NET website. At times we will have requirements where we should build our own components or use a third party component. The one I am going to discuss in this article is a Rating system developed by Imar Spaanjaars and it is free to use. Thanks to Imar!

Rating systems can be used to rate an item based on the users' opinion about the item. The item can be a commercial product on a shopping site, an article on a tutorial site, etc. where the other users judge the item's value based on the others' view. We can build a simple rating system using a RadioButton control that is packed with .NET. But still, the usability and manifestation will not be that pleasing. The Rating control developed by Imar fulfills all our expectation and shines as one of the best in terms of the flexibility it has given to a developer and also in terms of the usage by an end user. Get the source code from the reference section of this article and use it.

Whatever may be the component we want to use on our site we always like the following things.

·         Easy to use and modify.

·         Easy to display.

Imar has kept the above points in mind when he developed this control and the actual control itself is easy to use and deploy.

I have used this rating system on my article site and the moment I have seen the outcome I cannot stop myself saying it is really cool!!! Take a look!

Figure 1: ASP.NET Rating System

The control by default comes with stars as rating images. We can change the image to any other like the one on ASPAlliance or whatever we want. We need to compile the component with the new image as an embedded resource for our new images to work. Deploying the component is also very easy and is a single DLL with embedded resources. Meaning, if we change the image then we need to compile the component with the new images as embed resources as build action so that the final component itself will become a single DLL with the images being embedded in the DLL. By default, it takes an integer array of 5 elements as data source and it itself calculates average rating and displays it to the user. It also has an mechanism where we can have our control to check whether the user has rated this item before and cancel his action thus preventing duplicate rating by a user.

The control itself exposes an event prior to rating the item so that we can cancel or terminate the duplicate rating tried by the user. We can change the component code so that we can increase the rating scale to 10. Using this control in our site is as easy as using other ASP.NET controls, just drag and drop into the WebForm and give the minimal inputs it requires and it will work like a charm. What else we can expect from a rating system! Visit the link in the reference section and read his article about the technical aspects of the control and the other technical stuffs on how to use the control on our page.

Building a Simple Rating Control for ASP.NET 2.0

If you want to build a rating system for your site, you can always try using the above component given by Imar so that you can put your effort and time on other things. Thanks to Imar for providing such a useful system and saving our time. If you have any suggestion or an improvement for his component just put your comment on his site.