What's The (Share)Point?

Tag: list data

  • Notes to SharePoint Migration

    The company I work for purchased the Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint.  Overall, it has saved me lots of time migrating from Lotus Notes.  The main reason is that I have absolutely zero experience with Notes.  Now, the Quest tool allows me to migrate all of the rows into SharePoint pretty painlessly.  I was having one problem.  As I migrated Lotus databases, I was getting SharePoint lists with 50 -100 list items.  Performance lagged when trying to view those items and it made SPDesigner almost unusable.  I set out to find a way for the tool to create folders around a Created date.  My final solution utilized Lotus @Functions.

    In the spirit of trying to save someone else a lot of time, here is what I did. 

    1. I used Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint Designer.
    2. If you select a folder type in the mapping, Designer will create a folder with the name of the item.  If the item has a forward or backward slash, it will create nested folders.  So, I wanted a nested folder based on a date.
    3. In the Notes data definition, I created a new formula field.
    4. The formula that I used is:  @Text(@Year(@Created)))+”/”+@Text(@Month(@Created)))+”/”+@Text(@Day(@Created)))

      DateString Formula
    5. I created an alias of FolderDateString
    6. Output type is String.
    7. On the DataMapping, map the FolderDateString field to a Folder type. That will tell Designer to automatically create nested folders based on the string.
    8. That’s it!

    Hope this helps someone!

    mapped data
    Final data mapping

  • Exporting List Data

    If you have list data that you want to use in another application, what are some ways to get to that data? That was the question posed by a recent requirement from a client. Fortunately, SharePoint presents us with some creative ways to get to the list data.

    1. Export to Excel. This is a good, and quick, way to export data out of SharePoint so that you can use it in other programs. Once you have it in Excel, you can further export it into different formats. The most common is as a comma-delimited text file. I am not an Excel expert but it is quite easy to Export To Spreadsheet from the Actions menu and then save the Excel file in, say, a CSV format. From there, many applications can import that text file. But what happens if one of the SharePoint fields are large text fields that could contain commas and line feeds?
    2. Export to Access. For quite a few data export requirements, I tend to use this way. Access has better import/export functionality. I can save the exported list data in many formats. How do you do this? From the Actions menu, select Open With Access. [Note: this isn’t available in Document Libraries]. From there you can decide whether you want to maintain a local copy or just link to the list. Once you have it open in Access, you can export it in a number of different formats.
    3. If your third part application can call Web Services, SharePoint exposes a lot of functionality via Web Service.  Web Services are beyond the scope of this article but you can find plenty of information on MSDN, like Windows SharePoint Services Web Services.

    What are some of the ways you deal with the requirement of external applications using list data?  I would love to hear your comments!