SharePoint Web Services

The SharePoint Web Services connector is used to connect to the legacy SharePoint 2007 Web Services located at http://<sharepointserver>/_vti_bin/lists.asmx and can be used to work with Lists and Document Libraries.

The SharePoint Web Services provider has been superseded by the SharePoint Client API provider however it may still be valid in certain scenarios.

The SharePoint Web Services provider can be connected to the following editions of SharePoint.

• SharePoint 2007
• SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2013
• SharePoint 2016
• SharePoint Online (Office 365)

The Web Services connector can read and write data into SharePoint Lists and Document Libraries. The connector is limited by the capabilities of the SharePoint Web Services, for new projects we suggest you use the SharePoint Client API provider instead.

For large lists you will find that the Web Services connector is faster than the Client API connector.

Connection

To connect to a List or Document Library enter the URL to your SharePoint site. Choose the authentication and connect.

Only use the base url to your site i.e. http://<sharepointurl>/<site1>/<site2>

Next choose a List or Document Library to connect to.

ListUrl

Specifies the URL to the SharePoint Site that contains the list.

ListName

The name of the list that the data source is connected to.

ListViewName

The view that the data source is connected to this is normally the "All Items" view. If you want Data Sync to see a subset of List Items then you can select a user defined view.

DateTimeHandling

Specifies how DateTime values should be handled. If you use Local Timezone DateTime values then you should choose Local rather than UTC.

Choosing local causes data sync to convert SharePoint UTC values into your local timezone. When updating SharePoint local will cause your DateTime values to be converted into UTC.

DocumentLibraryUpdateBehaviour

Describes how Document Libraries are updated, by default a new file is copied into SharePoint on each ADD and UPDATE operation. If you only want to update the metadata then set this to 'MetaDataOnly` so that a new file is not uploaded.

ModerationStatus

Sets this Moderation Value on ADD and UPDATE of list items.

QueryLimit

Specifies the number of SharePoint List items to return in each HTTP Request. 5000 is the maximum supported by SharePoint. Data Sync will request all list values from SharePoint in pages of this size.

StripInvalidXmlData

Attempts to remove invalid XML characters from your data before being sent to the SharePoint Web Service.

Will strip invalid XML via a Regular Expression [^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\xD7FF\xE000-\xFFFD\x10000-x10FFFF] and convert \n to <br />

The SharePonit Client API connector should be used if you have XML errors.

TidyLookupData

Used to remove SharePoint references from lookup values so 1;#Value becomes Value. see Lookup Columns

UpdateBatchSize

Specifies the number of items to send to SharePoint in each HTTP Request.

Authentication

Current User

Use the current process identity as the authenticating user.

Credentials

Use the supplied windows Username, Password and Domain to authenticate with SharePoint.

Federated (Office 365)

Use credentials collected by logging in via browser based authentication with external Office 365 authentication provider.

This method collects the Federation Cookies from a browser session and uses them to authenticate with SharePoint. Since the cookies have a short expiry of only a few days this method does not work well in a production environment since the authentication must be preformed interactively to refresh the cookies.

ID Column

The SharePoint ID column is a read-only auto number column in SharePoint data sync cannot write a user value to this field therefore this column should not be part of your Schema Map when targeting SharePoint.

If you require a column to store the ID value from your source system we suggest that you create a new SharePoint column say ItemIDand use this as the target column for the ID value from your source system.

Lookup Columns

There is no built-in feature to handle SharePoint Lookup columns automatically with the Web Services connector. You will need to get the ID number of the related item and build the standard SharePoint Lookup reference.

SharePoint uses an internal format for Lookup Values similar to 1;#Value One where the number represents the ID value of the item in the related list and the text is the SharePoint Title field of that item. To set lookup values you need to build this string and map it to the SharePoint column.

Data Sync by default will hide these column values and just extract the text value, so first you need to disable this by setting TidyLookupData=False.

TIP: Use the Data Preview feature in Data Sync to see the data that SharePoint returns.

Assuming you have added a lookup to your data source back to SharePoint to get the List ID value for the related item you can build the value like this.

IF(ISNULL(Lookup1_ID), NULL(), FORMAT("{0};#{1}", Lookup1_ID, Lookup1_Title))

Or even via in-line LOOKUPA/B functions

IF(ISNULL(LOOKUPB("ID", "MyList", WHEN("Title", myValue)), NULL(), FORMAT("{0};#{1}", LOOKUPB("ID", "MyList", WHEN("Title", myValue)), myValue))

DSID

DSID is a special column name that Data Sync uses to maintain a GUID value on a list. By creating a column called DSID on your list whenever Data Sync sees this column it will write a new Guid value back to it if it's empty. Data Sync can also write a value to this column where as it cannot update the GUID built-in column.

DSID is used in 2-Way sync scenarios where an ID value must be created on each side that is always unique.