Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 4 Mar 2021

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From YouTube: Exporting SharePoint site structures/documentation to Markdown

Description

In this 9-minute Developer-focused demo, Kevin McDonnell outlines a scenario where the customer is requesting you enable them to manually create their own SharePoint sites – based on a guidebook you provide and using PowerShell is not an option! No worries, you got this. Use PnP PowerShell to develop sites in your Dev Tenant, then output the sites using the PnP Provisioning template – markdown or VS Code files. Complete site configuration is rendered in XML or readable markdown (guidebook). This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on March 4, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Kevin McDonnell (CPS) | @kevmcdonk

Supporting materials:
• Repo – PnP Framework Provisioning Providers | https://github.com/pnp/pnpframework/tree/dev/src/lib/PnP.Framework/Provisioning/Providers
• Template - Get-PnPSiteTemplate | https://pnp.github.io/powershell/cmdlets/Get-PnPSiteTemplate.html
• Template - PnP Provisioning Template | https://github.com/pnp/pnpframework/blob/dev/docs/ProvisioningExportMarkdownSample.md

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos

A

What I'm going to talk about today is a little challenge I had from a client, so just imagine a little bit. You've got a new project and the aim is you're going to create a set of sharepoint sites for a client and there's going to be all sorts of lists, backed up with site columns, content types all that all those good things you've got in sharepoint.

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Unfortunately, you're, probably thinking now great pmp, powershell expert, all that can fly up to the clients, environment, nice and easily, but this client you're working with, doesn't allow powershell in the environment yup. That was a fun thing to find out in the early stages of stuff. So we had to get all these sites created our dev tenants and then try and find a way to move those across. So you've got your build out of your sharepoint.

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No powershell all has to be manual, so anything you create you've got to recreate from scratch, plus they wanted these kind of to be templated sites that they could use for lots of different departments. So we had to give them a set of instructions, so the power users could then go and recreate stuff. And yes, you can go thing. I don't know about you. I hate doing documentation.

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I hate when you have a list of columns, you've got to type them all out and every time you need to make a change, you're going to go back and say right. I've changed in this site. Have we changed there? Have we changed it there? I just don't like doing it. Why? I love the pnp provisioning stuff, um because you can just recreate that, so I started to think about how could we actually script up? The creation of that came up with a few options. Think about we could pull the stuff out from csum use.

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Pnp powershell, you know, you've got the xml. We could just give them the xml and write stuff from that, but they're not going to like that. We could put out to csv start thinking about you could put in text files or even word documents, but gradually bottomed out to think about using pnp powershell a markdown.

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I did actually start scripting. My own thing as a console app with with the csom site, but I was like this is nuts. This could be something useful for other people and I could go and spin up a nice new github project or because pmp powershell is open source and there was all sorts of good things going on there. I could put in a pull request to that and that felt like a much better way to go.

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So I went ahead and I have to admit I hadn't kept up fully with what was happening with all the core implementations and looking at that at the time. I think it was. It was around november december time, so it was the early previews of the pmp framework and uh I've been chatting to paul bullock. So I was having a look at some of the pmp core stuff.

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What's great now is you're seeing the very latest there are green ticks all over the place. So you can see all the details from from this. I can see someone saying um I thought you can use the pmp powershell, so we were creating all the sites in our environment and then exporting taking that out from there and putting into their environment afterwards. So we could build it out all locally. Do all the development using pmp using powershell, but then to actually apply them back into their environment.

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We had to do things manually, so after a bit of going through the code and working out what could take place, uh I realized that we could do stuff with the pmp provisioning and, where that bit of being output to xml or um you can output it as a dot pmp file. I thought actually, if we could export all the definition as markdown files, then actually we could point the same pnp provisioning and get out an output.

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So I mocked up in words a little bit of a breakdown of what we needed and let me flip over to some uh definition here. You can see a breakdown of a site that I put together. So you can see you get all sorts of stuff as markdown, but those who love markdown are reading that nicely. If you're using vs code, you've got the preview templates, you can actually look at things there. You can see.

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We get the name of the template and if you put a nice template id in there, you'll get that as an output. uh You can see we list out the groups that have been associated there, the administrators, a few details on the navigation.

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I start off with a list of site columns. So a definition in the table, then for each of those site columns very easy to read views of that, and the intention was that you could get all these things. You could go down column by column and it's following the same as you get from the ui that you can actually see what's going on, so you can hand this doc.

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They can create that demo columns comments, column, they know its type um we put in there the internal name, because we knew we wanted to have it people when they create it and then save it differently. Oops double click there. So we we've put internal name display name and details, but then all the others we've tried to keep the formatting the same as you'd see from the ui, and you can see. We've got list of columns any content types. I've created it lists which columns are there for the content types and it exports the lists.

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The details that come out. It's got that list of each of those that exist on there. A list when we look at, for example, the demos one. It's got the description, whether it's on quick launch, etc, etc. So it really is helped there and being like this. I can do control a uh all of my words closed, but the the intention is, you can do control a copy. This paste it into words, apply your formatting.

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Then you've got a nice formatted document that you can hand over clients at the end of, and because this is the pmp call. I am going to go into a little bit of the code just to if anyone else wants to expand on this or take some of the areas, but you've got three key parts of this you're.

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Looking at the providers within that there then is a formatter that does that conversion into the type so, whether it's xml markdown json within there and then there's the writers, so the writers will take up each of the individual bits that write up the components such as the content, types and areas, different areas like that, so you can see it's a little bit messy the first time I looked at it. I probably went yeah.

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It was the the word I'd use on there, but once you dig into it, it's not too bad. So if you talk start on the formatter, you can see that there is a two provisioning template. uh It's not that one! Sorry, it's the two formatted templates and it brings up a set of writers and these different writers when you expand and look on there on the markdown there's one for each of the different types.

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So, whether it's the base properties, content types, features list instances and if we go into lists of those I'm just using a system that I am writing out lines. So it's just literally writing out the markdown line by line with the different formats looping through, for example, in this case the set of lists and just writing out the details, one by one where you've got groups such as the content type bindings. Then it's adding a for loop for binding and sometimes we're writing into subformatters within there.

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But it's once you get into the flow of things, it's quite easy to add the different details and things onto there. So if you do want to use it, there is oops need to go on to the other one. um If you do want to use it, it's just using the get pnp site template. So if you, if you haven't, used new core version, slight change of format from the pmp provisioning now- and it's got an example on there get pnp site template and you just do outputs to template.nd.

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So if I bring up, you can see, I've created the one there. Let's create template two. It does exactly the same as if you're exporting it out to an xml file, but instead of the xml file, you get the markdown file that you can go and use bits from and because it's the same, you can pass handlers to that.

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If you just want to get a list of site columns, if you want to put some filters in there, then you can put your different filters and just bring back particular lists or other items you want in there all the capabilities you can get from extracting pnp site templates. You can get with this markdown um the same format with the markdown as well, because it's all using the same mechanism now what's next, I think, is the answer. I haven't put all the handlers in there.

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So things like pages, I haven't catered for those I I think, there's some other bits, I'm trying to remember the other one I haven't done on there. I haven't done every single element and even within things like the site columns some of the specific scenarios, it doesn't necessarily cater for at the moment, we'd like to fill that out, let's put a bit more ability to add a simple filter, so get it to filter out all the default content types and all the default list templates and things like that.

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So, if you just want to extract out what's new to things, then it would be easy to do that. Most importantly, I'd love, you all to give it a try, and let me know what else you would like to see what be useful. How would you like different formatting? How how easy it's used? Are there different scenarios that you could see from it? um So please get your hands dirty with it, and let me know what you think also I'd encourage you all get involved in pnp powershell and all the pmp core work.

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uh I'm certainly planning later this year uh once this horrendous project, our mum's working on, and we can get the kids back to school and get bit back to uh normality of getting more hands-on with all the pnp core stuff. But please do there's so many welcoming people there who can come and help you through it. So yeah get involved back to you, paulo.

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Thank you very much kevin great.

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