SharePoint

In a previous post, I wrote about watching out for data type mismatches when using the CFSharePoint tag.  While this is all well and good, much of my post was based on  a misconception of how an "inout parameter" works.  While I can't claim great knowledge of this, I think I have a better understanding.

From what I understand, an inout parameter expects a specifically named parameter–let's say "Result"–to be passed in.  When you pass this parameter to the web service, the value, or "out", should be the variable that you want returned.  So if I want the "results" parameter to return its value as "finalResults", you could do something like:results="finalResults"

In the last post, I was under the impression that the initial value of "results" HAD to be a ColdFusion data type, like a structure or array.  This is not correct.  Sure, I can pass in the appropriate data type with the "results" parameter; however, whatever structure I pass in will overwrite the "out".  This is why if you run the example I provided in the last post, copying an "About.doc" file from one folder to another will really just create a new "About.doc" with the value of the binary object More >

Enough of lists!  The last few posts, I’ve been dealing with the same old boring lists, and I’ve grown tired of that.  So today, I want to show a quick example of how to use some of the Users and Groups web services to handle user and group management.

So let’s say I have a brand new user.  They have astounding technical skills, so I decide that I want to add her to a special group of users that I’ll call “Super Users”.  The only issue, however, is that this group does not exist.  So to check all the items off my list and call it a day, I need to:

• Create the “Super Users” group;
• Add Maria to this group; and
• Add some missing user information about Maria

The first thing we need is to create the new SharePoint group.  This is easy:

<cfsharepoint action="addgroup"
              domain="localhost"
              userName="un"
              password="pwd"
              name="theresult"
              wsdl="http://localhost/_vti_bin/UserGroup.asmx?wsdl"
              params="#{groupName="Super Users",
                        ownerIdentifier="mycomp\joel",
                        ownerType="user",
                        defaultUserLoginName="mycomp\joel",
                        description="A group of really cool, really powerful users :)"
                       }#"
/>

Regarding the info being passed, there’s nothing really to speak of.  However, you should notice that the method “addgroup” is not listed in the CF9 reference as being supported by the <cfsharepoint> tag (and believe me, a quick test reveals More >