Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 26 Jan 2023

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From YouTube: Building CAML query web part for easy data presentation

Description

When you need to quickly test a query, as an alternative to PowerShell, this simple web part allows the user to input a CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) Query. In this 10-minute developer-focused demo, Dan Toft selects a list and runs the query. Uses PnPjs behind scenes to map out item. Several custom CAML queries ship with sample – for example: to query things based on SharePoint Groups. Post Demo, there is a PnP CAML overview.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Viva Connections & SharePoint Framework Bi-weekly sync call recorded on January 26, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Dan Toft (Evobis ApS) | @tanddant

Supporting materials
• Sample - CAML to Table | https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/main/samples/react-caml2table
• Documentation - Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) schemas | https://learn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dev/schema/collaborative-application-markup-language-caml-schemas
• Controls - Reusable React controls for your SharePoint Framework solutions | https://pnp.github.io/sp-dev-fx-controls-react/
• Repo – CAMLjs | https://github.com/andrei-markeev/camljs
• chrome web store - CamlJS Console | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/camljs-console/ohjcpmdjfihchfhkmimcbklhjdphoeac
• library - Camlex.NET.dll | https://www.nuget.org/packages/Camlex.NET.dll/
• PnP Repo - CAML-Designer | https://github.com/pnp/CAML-Designer

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365/community

👋 Join to our weekly Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community calls to learn more. These are PUBLIC calls for you to get access on the latest details from Microsoft and to see awesome demos from community on these technologies - Download recurrent invites from https://aka.ms/community/calls

A

B

You can find me over on Twitter or pretty much any social media platform. These days, I work at a small consulting company here in Denmark called eobus and I am a SharePoint consultant developer like we all, are and do a little bit of everything, and this demo came about actually sort of relevant with Marcus's demo, because it's about what we can do to to query data from SharePoint lists. So we all know that there's a rest endpoint in SharePoint and there's camera query.

B

But there are some things that you can do with camera query that you can't do with with rest and so on and I was trying to make like showcase some way to to demo this uh so I built a quick report that I'll just demo real quick here. Where essentially what you do is you just take any list and you can write some chemical query and you can execute it and we're actually just using the PNP reusable controls down here to just map out every field of the item.

B

uh So there you go, you can have some data and you can use the the other sample just to interact with that data. If you need to and then I build in a couple of custom queries just for for, like the demo here of some of the things we can do with Campbell that we couldn't do with the rest endpoint one of those would be purring Things based on SharePoint groups.

B

So if we have a small list here of some some tasks that are going to be done, these should obviously not been hit. They should be in planner or to do but say you put them in SharePoint. We can use SharePoint groups and query based on whether the user is added to one of these groups or not so say I'm edit um to the IT department group. We can query, give me all the onboarding tasks for groups that I'm in now.

B

This is done using the membership thing and we can just click execute and there we go I'll get all the tasks that are assigned to the IT department and of course you can extend this the same way you could with anything else. You could do it with several queries, so you could go ahead and say all the tasks that aren't done there. You go uh and one thing that you can do with camera query that I haven't found a way.

B

So please, if somebody knows in the chat, go ahead a way to query a URL field by the actual URL and not the title of the thing. I haven't found a good way to do that in uh in the resting points. Okay, so that's it for the the demo of the actual like tool and just a quick note, you can actually uh grab the query part of your view or your your camera query and use that as a view for SharePoint list.

B

This will obviously break uh in case somebody actually edits. The View, but sometimes you want to do a list where you go ahead and say onboarding tasks and you can go ahead and you can say my pending tasks. There you go it's again, filtered based on the IIT Department. This is a great way to to do something where we're using custom code because we're using the PNP partial to set it and there's no way to do this with the UI.

B

But it's really fast. As for the code, well, I didn't want to focus too much on the list. View think, as we I knew Marcus was doing the demo just before me. It's one thing that I actually thought I would highlight uh is the uh which, if we're building functional components, we get. This thing called the the react context which is really awesome. We had it in like class components too, but it's way more functional doing it in like modern functional components.

B

So what we do is we create like our provider and then anywhere from there below in our code.

B

So, no matter how deep down you are in the component tree, you actually have the ability to to like go ahead and grab those items as long as you're below that which is really awesome, um because it avoids the thing where we used to like pass the spfx context down all the way, through all our components and you'd just be needlessly passing it around to get it to like somewhere where a list picker needed it, and then that's about it.

B

I noticed a few people in the chat asking during the thing about like a modern way to like do a camera query, building and I just wanted to shout out. There's a library called camel.js um I think I might actually have it installed in here. I, don't uh there's a great like Chrome extension too, and it actually makes it like fluently to write uh camera queries and translate them, and similarly there's one called camel EX for, like C sharp code that actually works really well and I.

B

I would like to share both of those out because someone who came into the like SharePoint Universe, not that long ago, writing camel careers really sucks. uh They they're great for what they can do, but like riding them by by hand, is a lot of work uh and it's one of those things where I end up always missing like a small tag. Yeah, uh that's about it. There's a link to the sample, a link to the documentation on camera queries and a quick link to the reusable controls.

B

I'll find it in the on the Chrome thing. That's it's like the best thing, if you don't like writing, camel Cruise. So what I always end up doing is I teach new new hires to write account on query and then we go and ride it with that thing and it's way faster way easier and that's it. For my demo. Thank.

C

You Don yet another great demo. Thank you so much. Let me share my screen and now that we are talking about uh building, camel queries and uh working with camel I saw in the chat, a few people mentioning the all good days and the camel Builder and all that kind of stuff that we used to use in the pasta, and uh it is this- is totally not planned to be in this call, but I think it is not a problem. Actually, it is an opportunity. Let me share that.

C

In the PMP organization we have the whole source code of the camel Builder, the one of the old good old days, thanks to Karim Bosch, who decided to share the whole source code with the community. We have this repository I'm, not sure that we already share this information or not, but now I'm sharing it, and we are also looking for people in the community willing to renew this tool and maybe make it like a new modern web part, or something like that. So here you find the whole social code give it an eye.

C

If you want, you can download and use it as like, as you used to do in the pasta, but you can also start modernizing it if you like, and we as the community, we will be more than happy to do that. Yes, yeah.

A

I will ask a few questions about this. Can you first explain what is camel for those who don't that this might be a completely new term for half of the people in this call, but somehow magically assuming that people know what is camel? That's.

C

Now you're making me feel really old, but you are totally right totally right, camel actually I, don't recall anymore. What the acronym is, but camel is the acronym of a language that you can use to build queries in uh SharePoint lists and libraries. So it is the language XML based language that we used to use in the past, at least, to write the structure of views and queries while working with SharePoint in developing SharePoint Solutions. Nowadays we don't use it very often, even if every now and then we still use a camel.

C

Maybe we don't know that it is camel, but we use it to filter. For example, when you create a custom View and you export a view with the PMP provisioning engine in the content of the provisioning template, there will be the XML of the camel defining the filter and it was collaborative application. Markup language. Thank you Visa. So that's the basic idea of camel it was really fundamental in the pasta. It is kind of well hidden in our days, but still completely there correct me if I'm wrong visa- and yes, it's.

A

Still behind after since uh in kuden pad so to say so, yeah.

C

Yeah precisely so, the camel Builder was a desktop Windows desktop application to a design, a graphically design, the camel queries rather than writing, uh then them manually and in XML syntax. It was really cool and useful because it was able to give you a preview of the results of the query, and then you were able to copy and paste the camel query into your actual code.

C

Of course, a desktop version, and specifically a desktop version for Windows, is not necessarily really useful. Nowadays, But A Renewed version, which will be cross-platform and eventually with a web UI I think it would be really really useful and interesting and, as you can see from the structure of this repository, you can already see that there are multiple layers. So you can eventually think about rebuilding the UI trying to keep the back-end infrastructure still as it is, but it is just a random idea. So.

A

C

I just wanted to share bias.

A

How biased you are for saying that Camel is awesome because it was XML I'm just watching the chat where you apparently have books related on XML and all of that.

C

So yeah yeah, yeah well I have to share that and then I will move eventually to a q. A there is a very good friend of mine who told me many years ago: Paulo you love, XML, XML sooner or later will disappear and will be well hidden under the cover of everything, but nobody will see it well. My friend was right, but I was right too, because XML is actually under the cover of many of the technologies that we use nowadays. So that's why I loved and I still love it.

C

Okay, sorry for this short personal story,.