A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013

A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013
A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013 - Book by Saifullah Shafiq

Friday, April 21, 2006

SharePoint Document Puller

SharePoint Document Puller

This is a small tool developed to extract documents from your SharePoint portal. Documents extracted will be saved to your hard disk. This utility will be of great help to the administrators who use SharePoint as document management system. I have worked with such systems. I have deployed enterprise level document management systems for large organizations and I know they have got hundreds of thousands of documents to store in SharePoint libraries. Searching for specific documents in such a large document management system is a headache, so that is where this tool will come in handy. Users can search for Word documents in SharePoint. Tool will return all word documents from all sites, subsites, libraries, etc. With a single click of a button, user can save the selected document to the hard disk. It's that simple.
I could have made this tool a complicated one with lots of other features but for the sake of simplicity, I have kept it small and simple. This version has two main features:
1. With a single click, you can find all Word documents in your SharePoint deployment.
2. You can save selected document to your hard disk.
Some features that I wanted to implement and might include in the next version:
1. Currently, application retrieves database settings from a text file and hence, it is important for users to modify this text file before being able to use the application. I wanted to include a couple of fields on the form itself so that users would not have to modify the text file. Furthermore, new users may find it difficult to locate the SharePoint database and add it's name to the connection string in the text file.
2. This application searches only Word files in SharePoint whereas it should have the capability to find all other types especially PDF, XLS, PPT, etc. This is not much work and only a couple of lines need to be included in the code. I promise I will do it in next release.
3. Application saves the Word file in the folder where the executable resides. Application should have allowed the user to select a location on the hard disk. This will be included in next release.
Here is what you need to do to run the executable:
1. Edit the db.txt file which is located in the same folder where the EXE resides. This file contains the db connection string. Modify the connection string in this file.
Data Source=sqlserver;Initial Catalog=myPortal1_SITE;User Id=sa;Password=abcd;
"Data source" is your sql server name. "Initial Catalog" contains the name of your portal server site database, for example, if your portal name is "myPortal" then most probably, your database name will be "myPortal1_SITE". Remember, there are three main databases associated with your portal:
a. myPortal1_PROF
b. myPortal1_SERV
c. myPortal1_SITE
We are concerned about the third one only, myPortal1_SITE. You also need to provide User Id and Password (if any) for your database. Modify the connection string and save the db.txt file.
The zip file attached contains only two files: SPDocPuller.exe and db.txt. I could have created an installer but that would have taken a lot of space unnecessarily. I assume you will be running this tool on the SharePoint box. The executable references following files, therefore these should be available on your machine:
1. Microsoft.Office.Core
2. Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal
3. Microsoft.VisualBasic
4. Scripting
Clicking the "Pull Document" button will save the file in the same folder from where you will run the executable file.
I will be looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
Thanks,

-SSA

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