Working with the Web Services in WSSv2 and v3 is an exercise in sheer frustration. I've written before about serious and glaring omissions in the Web Services API that Sharepoint exposes, but it's not only the things missing, it's the lack of consistency in the APIs that ARE implemented that's annoying.

For most of the APIs, the return value for most methods is an XmlNode, usually documented pretty well in the SDK. It means we have to fiddle with XML to extract data, but it's not so bad. For instance the Lists WS's GetListCollection() returns a known, documented, schema-linked XML containing many properties for a given list.

For some reason, though, the SiteData web service chooses to return data as typed objects instead - oddly named objects at that (_sList, _sWebWithMetadata[], and so forth), but only for SOME data. The GetSite() method, for instance, will return a typed metadata object for the site metadata and the list of Lists, but a completely untyped STRING containing XML data for the list of groups and group members.

Futhermore, these XML snippets are sometimes undocumented, and you have to try it out to see what you get. What you get, sometimes, is the same XML you would get from a call to a different web service, but stripped of the namespace - so even though it's the same structure, you can't use the same code to parse both.

Similarly the GetListCollection() method in SiteData. It returns a typed array of _sList objects which map to the XML that's returned from the ListsWS method, only for some reason, some oft the XML attributes are NOT mapped, and are inaccessible. So if I want to see whether a list is Hidden or not, I am unable to use the typed objects and have to resort to the loose XML manipulation.

Seriously, these rants are adding up. Does anyone know who's in charge of the web services for Sharepoint and why they're so badly designed? No consistency, missing functionality, bad documentation - what's going on here? This isn't v1, either, but very little seems to have changed since the original documentation for WSS v2 in 2003.

1 Comment

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