Cracking the code... err, sequence

Sorry, been reading the Da Vinci code too much lately (don't ask me how anyone could make a movie out of this, maybe with Dan Brown sitting in a chair counting his money for 2 hours?).

Anyways, as a follow-up to my AddFieldAsXml post there's a problem with this silly method that has provoked me to build a tool. On top of the issue with the whole Name vs. DisplayName thing, the Field CAML you pass it has to be in a certain order. Do not pass Go. Do not Collect $200. The kicker is that certain combinations of CAML make it throw a lovely exception that says (drumroll kids...) "An Error has occurred." Yup. No message (that is the message). No inner exception. A cryptic error number that couldn't possibly be a lookup into anything (especially since it's a negative number). No recovery. No hope.

What a PITA. So it prompted me to build a mini-SCHEMA.XML parser and validator. I'm just going through the matrix of combinations of attributes you can and can't use and what order they can (or cannot) be in to work. So the tool is just a silly desktop thingy. Paste in the <Field> CAML and it'll tell you if it's valid based on the rules I'm coming up with now. Like I said, there seem to be a never ending myriad of combinations that work but just as many that don't. It's very very odd, as if Microsquishy is looking for certain attributes based on ordinal position or something. So a few more hours of screwing around, digging through Reflector as far as I can go into the SharePoint libs and I'll have a tool for you to use. I'll leave it to someone to blow it out to a full blown SCHEMA.XML validator as I don't have the patience after todays SharePoint Episode from Hell. Back later with screenshots and source code.