NAVERTICA SharePoint Extensions (SSOM)

Incredibly useful package of extension methods for SharePoint 2013 server-side object model (SSOM), making SharePoint development less of a pain - particularly when used with dynamic languages.

To see what we're doing with DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) languages like IronPython, check out https://github.com/NAVERTICA/SPTools, our full-fledged solution to using scripts to handle all kinds of SharePoint development and features, have all configurations available in a single place and functionalities activated in several places at once with a simple URL routing with wildcards.

Feedback, ideas, patches welcome.

Less scaffolding, less coupling

We tried to solve many of the common tasks routinely required of SharePoint programmers once and for all with convenient extensions on SharePoint objects, and take care of some of the many possible inconsistencies in the legendary SSOM API behind the scenes.

We also tried to solve some of the coupling issues - you can't just pass anything SPRequest related to another thread, so we're often working with our own classes like WebListId and WebListItemId, SimpleLookup etc., which contain the IDs of the required objects and method to transparently access them, without being bound to specific SPRequests.

Another, much more daring, goal, which we have not reached by far and with the decline of SSOM probably never will, was to basically replace calls to SharePoint API with calls to our own extensions and thus decouple our business code from SharePoint API, which should've made it easier to replace the underlying SSOM with something else in the future.

We make it easy to

• open webs, lists, process items, without having to care about opening and disposing SPRequest connected objects and without pondering "do I have to use a Guid, or was it internal name? Oh, in this case it was display name, damn these inconsistencies..."
• copy or move items in both document libraries and custom lists - including metadata, attachments...
• look up content types by both name and ID
• check if fields with internal name exist in a list or content type
• find lists by type or content type
• do a lot of other things you probably already needed or will need to do shortly, if you're a SharePoint developer.

Usage

Just reference the DLL in your project and use some of the extension methods that will appear on standard SharePoint objects.

Some examples

• SPListItem/SPFolder.CopyToFolder Copies item to another folder or list, including attachments, matching metadata, even old versions. Can be used on entire folders with a timerjob or SPLongOperation

• SPListItem.FieldsChangedBetweenVersions Given two versions of an item, returns the internal names of fields that changed

• SPListItem.FormUrlDisplay, SPListItem.FormUrlEdit Simple way to return full url to item forms

• SPListItemCollection.ProcessItems, SPList.ProcessItems Runs given delegate on items, no need to manually dispose of SPRequest-bound objects or throttle the query. Now processing items returned by a CAML query can look like this:

  var titleCollection = list.ProcessItems(item => item["Title"], filterSPQuery);

  Need to process every file in a folder and it's subfolders, and perhaps filter them by a complex query? You can forget about manually throttling the query, and just do this:

  var resultingNumberFieldValuesCollection = 
    folder.ProcessItems(
    	delegate(SPListItem item) { 
    			item["NumberField"] = item["NumberField"] * 2; 
    			item.Update(); 
    			return item["NumberField"]; 
    	}, optionalSPQuery, true);

  var titleCollection = item.ProcessLookupItems("LookupInternalName", itemInLookup => itemInLookup["Title"]);

• SPListItem.TraverseItemLookups Given an item and a list of internal names of lookup fields, this function will traverse items until it reaches an empty lookup or the last item, and returns the field value of last field's internal name.

• SPListItem/SPListItemVersion/SPItemEventProperties.Get, .Set: Read (and write, where possible) normalized values of SPListItems, SPListItemVersions, SPItemEventProperties (for Event Receivers with AfterProperties). All the returned values look the same, whichever object they come from, and writing the values also works the same independent of whether the underlying object is an SPListItem or AfterProperties of an item in receiver.

  With Get and Set you can forget about having to do stuff like this:

  var myUsers = new SPFieldUserValueCollection();
  foreach (string usr in MyUserList) {
    var usrValue = web.EnsureUser(usr);
    myUsers.Add(new SPFieldUserValue(web, usrValue.ID, usrValue.Name));
  }
  item["MyUserField"] = myUsers;

  And instead just do this:

  item.Set("MyUserField", MyUserList);

  Similarly, you could pass an enumerable with logins, names, emails, IDs, even mixed, or just put it all in a long semicolon-separated string - it would still get processed just fine.

• SPPrincipal/SPUser/SPGroup.Enabled Checks Active Directory if the user or group is enabled.

• SPUser.GetManager Returns given user's manager using AD

• SPUser.FindWebsForUser Return identification for all subwebs the given user has access to

• SPWeb.GetSPUser/s Doesn't care whether you pass it an email, login, name or integer user ID, it just return the user(s)

• SPWeb.OpenList Doesn't care if it receives an URL, a list name or a Guid, just opens the list, and doesn't throw an uncatchable exception if the user doesn't have rights.

• SPWeb.ProcessLists Runs the given delegate on all lists in web

Query Tools - strongly typed CAML query helper classes

Build queries incrementally

Q query = new Q();
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Value1))
{
	query.Add(new Q(QOp.Equal, QVal.Text, "FieldValue1", Value1.Trim()));
}
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Value2))
{
	query.Add(new Q(QOp.BeginsWith, QVal.Text, "FieldValue2", Value2.Trim()));
}
SPListItemCollection col = list.GetItems(query.ToString());

Safely build complex queries, integrate with existing CAML queries and query fragments...

Q q = 
	new Q(QJoin.And,
	  new Q(QJoin.And,
		new Q(QOp.Equal, valueType, config.ItemInternalName, item[config.ItemInternalName]),
		new Q(QJoin.Or,
			new Q(QJoin.And,	
				new Q(QOp.Greater, QVal.DateTime, config.EndDateInternalName, item[config.EndDateInternalName]),
				new Q(QOp.LesserOrEqual, QVal.DateTime, config.EndDateInternalName, item[config.EndDateInternalName]])
			),
			new Q(QJoin.And,	
				new Q(QOp.Lesser, QVal.DateTime, config.StartDateInternal, item[config.StartDateInternal]]),
				new Q(QOp.GreaterOrEqual, QVal.DateTime, config.StartDateInternal, item[config.StartDateInternal]])
			)
		)
	  ),
	  new Q("<DateRangesOverlap><FieldRef Name=\"EventDate\" /><FieldRef Name=\"EndDate\" /><FieldRef Name=\"RecurrenceID\" /><Value Type=\"DateTime\"><Today /></Value></DateRangesOverlap>"),
	  new Q(QOp.NotEqual, QVal.Counter, NVRField.ID, item.ID)
	  );
SPQuery query = new SPQuery
{
	ViewFields = ViewFlds,
	CalendarDate =
		SPUtility.CreateDateTimeFromISO8601DateTimeString(
			item[config.StartDateInternal].ToString()),
	ExpandRecurrence = true,
	Query = q.ToString(true)
};
SPListItemCollection col = list.GetItems(query);

Copyright (C) 2015 NAVERTICA a.s. http://www.navertica.com

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.