Note: this applies to SharePoint 2010 and 2013, it is not viable for SharePoint online / Office 365.

Fun fact, SharePoint, if you’ve got branching logic in your survey, allows you to save your response to a survey!

This is great news. However on TechNet someone asked if it were possible to find these incomplete posts to remind the user that they haven’t finished?

Normally you’d assume that all you’d need to do is log in with a site collection admin account and you’d magically be able to see all the responses, even those that haven’t been completed. However in this case you’d be wrong. Even with Site Collection admin rights those incomplete responses are hidden from you.

Now that data is still in the SharePoint list and rather than mess about with permissions and settings, which could have unforeseen consequences, let’s see if we can’t pull it out of the list with PowerShell?

The first thing to do is see if we can get the real number of items from the survey. The easiest way to do that is to check the item count.

$web = Get-SPWeb "URL"
$survey = $web.Lists["SurveyName"]
Write-Host "Items in the survey : " $survey.ItemCount

That gives you the number of items, which you can compare to those visible. In my case I had one completed and one partial, leading to a total count of two. Which the script agreed with.

When you look at the object in PowerShell you can see that there’s a few fields that are different between a completed and a partial response. In this case we have two that are of interest.

The differences between a visible, completed item (1) and an incomplete item (2)

Of the two i’m going to use the ‘HasPublishedVersion’ field. Live the ‘Level’ field it will become true as long as a version has been completed, however unlike Level it will remain true even if the user starts to edit it later and somehow manages to do a partial save.

Let’s extend our script to list out the number in each group, then list the users who created them.

$web = Get-SPWeb "http://portal.tracy.com/sites/GD/"
$survey = $web.lists["Survey"]
$unPublishedEntries = $survey.Items | ? {-not $_.HasPublishedVersion}

Write-Host "Surveys in list: " $survey.ItemCount
Write-Host "Of which entries are incomplete: " $unPublishedEntries.Count

Foreach ($entry in $unPublishedEntries)
{
    Write-Host "User: {0} has not completed their entry" -f $entry["Created By"]
}

And voila, my results give us:

Printout from script