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Using MS SharePoint as data source : Part 1

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So far you  might have used various means of keeping your test data or have retrieved it from various sources such as flat files MS Excel MS Access SQL etc. Have you ever come across a scenario where you have to pull data from SharePoint?  you don’t! No worries it’s always a good thing to learn something new. Maybe this will give you some idea to automate couple more things 🙂 .

This a three part series on using sharepoint as data source

Part 1 – Sharepoint and usage Basics Part 2 – Retrieve data from Sharepoint Part 3 – Post data to Sharepoint

In this part we will discuss the basic understanding of SharePoint so that it will be easy to proceed further.

  Why would I need to connect to SharePoint?

You must be wondering why I need to connect SharePoint when I already have various other ways. Here are some of the scenarios –

Share-point is being used for storing all the artifacts at common place. Your automation require to upload some kind of documentation to the share-point for everyone to refer or its required to fetch a document for your automation purpose.

Data for application is being maintained at share-point – It might be possible that the input data or any other reference data has been maintained at share-point list which you need to retrieve or update data.

Request for automation – There could be a scenario where you want to automate in such a way that your automation will trigger based on the request and data entered at a form at share-point. And your script would act based on the data provided.

Use share-point as reference data to trigger Test Execution – You want to have a common location to select test cases to trigger execution and have the status updated at the same location instead of maintaining separate excel file.

There could be many more scenarios like this. If we just  know the basic approach to pull and push data to SharePoint This would solve the other different scenarios.

  What is SharePoint?

This is for those who are not aware of SharePoint although I feel everyone does know by now but just in case not!

Microsoft SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document management platform. This is widely being used as intranet sites for everyone in an organization for news announcement tasks data documentation and access to variety of information. There are various features which can be utilized to make an easy and effective collaboration.

Although it has some 8-10 components for different purposes. here are the three important things which everyone must know about SharePoint

Sites: A share-point site is a Web site that share-point manages in ways that are compatible with its content-management features. share-point sites can contain many user facing share-point features such as Document Libraries Lists Wikis Blogs and Discussion Boards.

Document Libraries:  A Document Library provides a common location or repository for the team to collaborate and keep artifacts which includes document check-in and check-out versioning security and workflow.

Lists: Lists is like MS Excel or MS Access mostly Access that stores data in columns and rows. Almost all of the user facing share-point features stem from Lists. 

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Connecting SharePoint

Data from SharePoint can be retrieved by any of the following ways

Using Sharepoint Object model – this can be used only on the machine (server) where SharePoint is installed.

Using Sharepoint Lists Service – Connecting SharePoint and retrieving data from SharePoint list web service.

Using OLE DB Connection – connect the way you use to connect databases.

I will not cover the Sharepoint Object Model as part of this post as its out of topic for this post. also this is not something you would normally wont need to cover in your day to day work. In order to the object model to work it is required to have the SharePoint server installed on the same machine where you are working. It is mostly being used by the SharePoint developers to create Web Parts etc.

Using Sharepoint Lists Service

SharePoint provides various methods to work with SharePoint lists via its lists web service. This service can be accessed for your site by setting the web reference as below

http://yoursharepointsite/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx

To retrieve the data we need to post request to service and the data will be contained in the response. This needs to be parsed for further use.

Few things you should know before you proceed.

CAML query – to retrieve the data based on some condition we need to write request xml accordingly. This would be possible easily Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML). CAML Query is XML based query language and it has predefined tags.  For example root element for the query will be defined by the tag – Query.

Within the Query element you have two elements possible:

1. Where   – to filter the data

2. OrderBy – to categorize the data

A simple structure of the CAML query is as follows:

<Query>           <Where>                    <Eq>                              <FieldRef Name=”FieldName” />                              <Value Type=”DataType”>Value</Value>                    </Eq>           </Where>           <OrderBy>                              <FieldRef Name=”FieldName” />                              <FieldRef Name=”FieldName” />           </OrderBy> </Query>

SharePoint field Naming Convention in Response – Next important thing you should know is the way Sharepoint names the fields or columns internally. Sharepoint manage the field names differently. Just like you see in most of the web URL %20 for the spaces SharePoint uses x0020 for the spaces. For example for field name “First Name” the internal name would be ”Firstx0020Name”. you should use this name for the query.

In the response you will find the same represented as with a suffix “ows” so for First Name field this would be “ows_First_x0020_Name”. In case there are no spaces the name would be “ows_FirstName”.

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