I am a big proponent of leveraging SharePoint to deliver enterprise line-of-business applications (LOB's). Much of the custom development we do at The eGroup involves the use of SharePoint lists as data repositories for dashboards, workflows, roll-ups and, of course, LOB's. Working extensively with SharePoint lists brings introduces its own set of challenges - coding against the web services, creating and maintaining a large number of custom views, managing security and migration of list structure/content from development to staging and production.
In the course of developing these applications we have created a set of tools to aid us in our efforts. To save our fellow SharePoint developers some of the headaches we've encountered, and to encourage other developers to contribute their time-saving apps, we'll be releasing various applications and utilities from our toolkit in the coming weeks and months. The first utility, the SharePoint List XML Viewer, received an enthusiastic response and generated a fair number of downloads. I hope it is serving everyone well and we will continue to improve it as we receive feedback from the SharePoint community.
The second tool to be released, the SharePoint List Creator, is a companion utility to the List XML Viewer. Using the XML output gathered from the XML Viewer, it provides developers with the ability to define custom lists in XML and easily deploy them to multiple sites/areas. This can be quite a time saver when you have a large number of heavily customized lists that must be moved to different environments, especially when each portal or site collection exists in disparate server farms and/or separate domains.
To use the SharePoint List Creator you'll need good working knowledge of XML and some CAML experience. Creating a new list requires a source XML file that contains the properties, fields, and views that will comprise the list. A sample file, DocumentLibrary.xml, has been provided in the \XML directory to give you a basic template to work from (remember to store all your custom list templates in this same directory). If you haven't done much CAML or manual list creation, a good first step would be to create a custom list in the SharePoint GUI then view the list structure with the List XML Viewer. Compare the output to the sample xml template and it won't take long to figure out how to create just about any list type from scratch. We'll release more samples in the future to aid new developers and in response to comments/requests.
To use the SharePoint List Creator, first download the eGroup SharePoint Utilities Windows Installer package from our web site. This package contains both the SharePoint List Creator and the SharePoint List XML Viewer. Next, install the MSI on your development machine and launch it from the program menu shortcut. Provide the site/area URL, list name, type, source XML document, and authentication credentials, and submit the changes. The tabs in the utility will display the source XML, new list XML being submitted, the results from the list updates, and the results from the view modifications. You'll also find any errors encountered under the appropriate tab (i.e. if view creation fails, check the "View Results" tab).
We'll update the Utilities suite with new apps as we convert or create them (many are ASP.NET applications that require migration to Windows Forms prior to deployment). As always, please post your questions, suggestions, feature requests, gripes and complaints as comments to the post. Feedback is the only method we have to gauge the community reaction to our efforts. I hope you find the tools useful. Enjoy!
