Help: Poll Daily Planner

Use the Poll Daily Planner to see which polls will appear on a Poll control for any given date. The Poll control has access to your entire poll database. It uses today's date and any categories that you've assigned to narrow the list. It uses the Priority field on each Poll record to order them. It can display all of them or shorten the list further. The Poll Daily Planner clarifies which records will appear by showing a list of polls, based on date and category criteria that you supply and ordered by priority.

To use the Poll Daily Planner, fill in the Data Settings and click Show The Polls. At minimum, enter the date which you are planning into the Date to View field. Once the list is displayed, it has the same commands as the Poll Administration page where you can add, edit, delete, and view entry and results.

When you have a Poll control that uses categories, you should enter the same criteria in Select by Categories. To save you some time, the Poll Daily Planner includes the Quick Lookup fields to save and retrieve your criteria. These two concepts are detailed below.

Select By Categories

Use the Select by Categories fields to narrow the data to the same categories found on one of your Poll control. You must first determine those categories. Unfortunately, this page cannot retrieve them from the Poll control because each poll control has its settings on other pages. The category data is found on the Poll control's xCategories property.

Use the Any and All radio buttons to match the xCategories-xOrConditionB properties. When xOrConditionB is true, check the Any radio button.

The remaining settings of xCategories are the xMatchList property which determine the text and rule to find the text applies. The rules are:

Exact - the text must match the full category.
Contains - the text can be any part of the category.
Starts with - the text must begin a category.
Ends with - the text must be at the end of the category.

Matching is always case insensitive.

Example

Suppose your Poll control has this within it's ASP.NET page:
<Poll:Poll id=Poll1 runat=server xCategories-xOrConditionB=false [many other attributes]>
  <xCategories>
    <Poll:MatchListItem xTextToMatch="Food" xTextMatchRule="Exact" />
    <Poll:MatchListItem xTextToMatch="NewEngland" xTextMatchRule="EndsWith" />
  </xCategories>
</Poll:Poll>

Enter it as follows:
Mark the All radio button because xOrConditionB is false.
Set the first category drop down list to Exact and the text to "Food".
Set the second category drop down list to EndsWith and the text to "NewEngland".

Category Commands

The fields of this row make it easier to work with categories. After all, who wants set up the category fields each time?

This system retains your category fields using cookies in your browser. So if you have disabled cookies, these commands will not work. There are 10 slots which can retain your settings. They are named "Categories 1" through "Categories 10" and shown in the Quick Lookup drop down list. You should associate them with individual Poll controls. Here's how to save and retrieve category settings:

To save, choose the slot where you want to save from the drop down list then click Save.
To retrieve, choose the slot containing the saved settings from the drop down list and click Get.

Use the Clear Categories button to set the category fields to their defaults.

While this page doesn't let you change the names of the slots, here is a trick to do so. Edit the file Poll_WebAdmin\CategoryQuickLookup.xml. It houses the names of the slots and is designed so you can edit it, so long as you maintain the XML structure it uses.
NOTE: The Quick Lookup's data is shared with other features in this program.