It’s been a bit of a hiatus since I’ve posted anything on my blog. 2 kids, a job change, and a move across country will do that. Anyway, tonight’s post is one I’m doing more for self-preservation and hopefully others will find it useful. There are a lot of documentation black holes out there in the Sharepoint land and it seems that the WebPartPages web service is one of them.
In a project I’m currently working on, there is a need to automate a project creation process that is very manual to something more automated. Fortunately we have Nintex Workflow to handle situations like this. Part of this workflow is to provision a new subsite after the project is approved by the project manager. Nintex makes this easy with their LazyApproval feature and create site action.
What I needed to do was upon site creation from a template, add some web parts to the home page. This is where I was running into the huge documentation gap. I turned to one of my goto libraries, SPServices, to protoype the actual calls before porting it over to my workflow. Fortunately someone had tried to do this same thing in the past and provided a working example for adding a content editor web part. That is described here and worked no problem. My issue is I need to add list view web parts of document libraries and lists. I tried many things over the span of a couple days to tweak that to get my web parts onto the page. No dice.
Today I stumbled upon a post by Glyn Clough that filled that documentation black hole.
I need to use the List View Web Part markup, adjusting the ListUrl value were appropriate, like this for lists:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<webParts>
<webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
<metaData>
<type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
<importErrorMessage>Cannot import this Web Part.</importErrorMessage>
</metaData>
<data>
<properties>
<property name="ListUrl" type="string">Lists/CustomList</property>
<property name="ExportMode" type="exportmode">All</property>
</properties>
</data>
</webPart>
</webParts>
and like this for document libraries:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<webParts>
<webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">
<metaData>
<type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
<importErrorMessage>Cannot import this Web Part.</importErrorMessage>
</metaData>
<data>
<properties>
<property name="ListUrl" type="string">Library</property>
<property name="ExportMode" type="exportmode">All</property>
</properties>
</data>
</webPart>
</webParts>
Once escaped and passed into my SPServices function I had web parts on my web part page.