Using SharePoint Web Services: SharePoint Explorer Example Tool

One of the nice things about SharePoint is that there are many ways of accessing the data. The most obvious is of course the web interface, but to accomplish thight integration with for example Office 2003, SharePoint offers a bunch of web services. These web services provide identically functionality as you get using the web interface; everything you can do in the web interface is possible using the web services! A nice example of the use of these web services is the integration with Office 2003. When you open a Office 2003 document that's stored in SharePoint, you'll get some extra information about the SharePoint site.

The MSDN library has a list of all the web services that are available in SharePoint. Of course you can use them to create your own applications that integrate with SharePoint. To illustrate this, and to try some things out, I've create a little tool: the SharePoint Explorer. This tools let you connect to any SharePoint site, and retrieve all sub sites. The results are displayed hierarchically in a treeview. Here are some screenshots:

 

You can download the complete source code here.

7 Comments

  • Nice! That's the reason I still like webservices. I don't see people using webservices yet for exchaning information across internet or anything. But building a Winforms client on top of your web interface seems great!



    Ofcourse, it's a lot of extra work. The web interface, the web service(s) _and_ the winforms client. But after that you've got some great functionality!

  • Good example. Personally I like to build my own Web services layer around the object model or Web Services of SharePoint itself and not let client applications talk directly to SharePoint via the SharePoint Web Services. If you start for example consuming the Web Services for retrieving the items out of a list, you will start to experience the reason behind it.

  • Yeah, I know... handling plain XML comming from the Lists webservice can be a royal pain in the *ss (been there, done that). I like the idea of a wrapper web service around them ... let's see if I can find some more time!

  • That's cool, though I was hoping for something that would discover sites no longer linked anywhere, mainly to discover orphaned sites (like on a dev server). There must be a list of SharePoint sites somewhere in the db, anyone know how to get at it?

  • Hi,



    Could you tell me please,are there any way to get all web sites on the portal.For example

    i have two site on portal:



    1) MySite

    2) Yoursite



    i want to search thus two site and all of their subsite and directory by using web service



    are there any web service or services that help me to collect this info.



    i saw in this tool that there can be only get one site info whose url added adress text box.



    thanks,

  • Hi jan,

    Please update link download, i can't get it.
    Thank you in advance.

  • Hello Is it possible to create a wrapper web service over the existing MOSS exposed web services?

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