List Folder – a journey into software best practices with maria grazia merlo

In this post I’m going to show you how to create a list item inside a folder in a SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow even though the “Create List Item” built-in action and even the new rest api do not allow us to do that.

Scenario

We have a folder inside a custom list and we need to automatically create items inside it using a SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow.

Item in Folder- Folder

Problem

In a SharePoint 2010 workflow we used to simply set the “Folder” property in the built-in action “Create List Item”… and it worked! Our item was correctly created inside the specified folder. Unfortunately in a SharePoint 2013 workflow setting the “Folder” property has no effect. Even the new SharePoint 2013 rest api does not come to our rescue.

Solution

We can use the old listdata.svc service to achieve our goal making a rest call to it inside our SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow.

Steps

1. Create the headers dictionary

We must build a dictionary to store some headers, specifically the following ones:

Accept: application/json;odata=verbose
Content-Type: application/json;odata=verbose

Item in Folder- Headers.png

2. Create the data dictionary

Next, we need a dictionary that will contain our request data.

The dictionary must have an entry for each item mandatory fields and an entry to set the item path.

Title: Item 1
Path: <list url>/Folder 1

Item in Folder- Data

The item path must be constructed dynamically to point to the folder we want to place our item in.

Item in Folder- Path

3. Call the SharePoint REST service

Finally, we are ready to call the SharePoint REST service to create our item inside the list folder.

To do this we need to insert the “Call HTTP Web Service” action in our workflow.
The action url must be constructed dynamically like this:

https://site/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/SimpleList

Item in Folder- Endpoint.png

The http method must be set to POST.

Item in Folder- Method

The request headers must be set to the headers dictionary.
The request content must be set to the data dictionary.

create_list_folder10

Conclusion

This is how the complete workflow should look like:

Item in Folder - Workflow

Now we can publish and run it and see that a new item is correctly created inside our folder.

Item in Folder- Folder Workflow Completed

Item in Folder- Item Workflow Completed

References

MSDN

In this post I’m going to show you a workaround to an issue with SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows in correctly creating a list folder.

Scenario

We have a custom list and we need to dynamically add folders to it through a SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow.

create_list_folder12

Why

A first question could be:

Why on earth would you need to create a folder in a list? Folders are intended for libraries and files!

There are scenarios when you need to have folders in your list, one of this is to manage permissions at a finer level than the list level, avoiding having to set unique permissions for each list item.

A second question could be:

Why on earth do you need to create folders with a workflow?

There could be scenarios in which folders need to be created dynamically in reaction to some event.

Problem

A list folder is simply a special type of list item.
So it seems quite simple… In the workflow use the “Create List Item” action and set its content type to “Folder”. Yes, it works! The folder is created!

But wait… Clicking on the folder an ugly system name appears in the breadcrumbs (ID_.000)… Oh no! What’s that?!?

create_list_folder2

This happens because there is a mismatch between the title of the folder that we can set in the workflow and its name that is assigned automatically (respectively “Folder 1” and “66_.000” in the example above).

Unfortunately we can’t set the name of a list folder directly using the create or update list item workflow actions.

Solution

We can use the SharePoint REST API to change the list folder name after having created it.

Now we only need to know which particular property of the list folder sets its name…
We can find that by inspecting the folder properties through a rest call via a browser like this:

https://site/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('listname')/items(ID)/FieldValuesAsText

create_list_folder3
You can see that value “ID_.000” is hold by the field “FileLeafRef”.
So now we need to update this field of our newly created folder using REST.

Let’s see how to do that in detail…

Steps

1. Get the list item type

To get the list item type we need to use the SharePoint REST API via a browser like this:

https://site/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('listtitle')

and get the value for the “d:ListItemEntityTypeFullName” element.
In the example below the list item type is “SP.Data.TestFolderListListItem”

create_list_folder4

2. Create the headers dictionary

We must build a dictionary to store some headers, specifically the following ones:

Accept: application/json;odata=verbose
Content-Type: application/json;odata=verbose
Content-Length: <length of post body>
X-HTTP-Method: MERGE
If-Match: *

create_list_folder5

3. Create the metadata dictionary

Next we need to create a dictionary to store our metadata.
This dictionary will contain only one entry for the list item type we’ve obtained previously:

type: SP.Data.TestFolderListListItem

create_list_folder6

4. Create the data dictionary

Next, we need one more dictionary that will contain our request data.

The dictionary must have an entry with key “__metadata” (note the double underscore before the “metadata” string) with its value set to the previously created metadata dictionary.

We also need to add another entry in the data dictionary with its key set to “FileLeafRef”.

__metadata: <metadata dictionary>
 FileLeafRef: Folder 1

create_list_folder7

5. Call the SharePoint REST service

Finally, we are ready to call the SharePoint REST service to update our folder name field.
To do this we need to insert the “Call HTTP Web Service” action in our workflow.
The action url must be constructed dynamically to point to the newly created folder like this:

https://site/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('listtitle')/items(n)

create_list_folder8

The action verb must be set to POST.

create_list_folder9

Set the request headers to the headers dictionary.
Set the request content to the data dictionary.

create_list_folder10

Conclusion

This is how the complete workflow should look like:

create_list_folder11

Now we can publish our workflow and run it. Once it is over we’ll have our folder correctly created with its title and name matching.

create_list_folder12

create_list_folder13

References

StackExchange