MOSS: Using the List Web Service to Rename a File
Right, so I ran into an interesting problem recently. I needed to rename a bunch of files in a document library we have on our team’s MOSS site. Problem is, this is a lot of documents. So I figured I’d use MOSS’s web services to do it.
Now in MOSS, a document library is just a specialized list of items (the items just happen to be files). So the web service that I need to use is the MOSS Lists web service (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/lists.aspx). Turns out, doing this with the MOSS Lists web service isn’t quite as trivial as I thought it would be (it never is :D).
So here it is, a super simple WPF application that lets you see Document Libraries in a MOSS site and then rename files within a selected document library:
The meat of the logic is in the btnRename_Click handler. I use the user inputs to build up a batch element that tells the UpdateListItems method what to do. More information about the Batch element here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms437562.aspx.
The interesting thing about using the Batch element is that not only can you process a whole bunch of files, but you can do different operations on each one of them. What’s more, the OnError flag lets you specify what happens if one of the operations in the Batch runs into an error.
