Peter Seale's weblog

Monday, October 15, 2007 12:00:13 PM UTC 

I find it difficult to explain why I bother using PowerShell with SharePoint; it isn't easy to find a killer example. What I'm about to present is also not a killer example—I just figure that, after a while, I'll wear you down with enough mediocre examples that you'll be convinced. Or tired enough to give up resisting; either is fine with me.

Today's mediocre example

Introducing your team's new knowledgebase! To help everyone get started, I've already created the site and a wiki library (wiki libraries are not exactly the same as wiki sites; the differences are meaningless in the context of this discussion).

We're going to call this wiki library "Yet another soon-to-be abandoned knowledgebase", in an odd naming coincidence that I'm sure has no basis in reality. Everyone I know has plenty of time, incentive and managerial support to document all critical and common processes in an organized and thorough manner. I'm sure your experience mirrors mine.

In the screenshot below, you'll note we have created our knowledgebase.

Looking at the list view of this wiki library, you'll also notice that our team members have done their part, quickly and efficiently creating articles. Whoa there—watch your back, Wikipedia!

Looking at individual entries (like the one below), you'll notice that each entry begins with its own specially formatted title. We have all been so good as to consistently apply this convention across the entire wiki.

[Because I can't leave this alone, I'll note that no, those aren't real keys. Or if you find out that they are real keys, dude! DUDE! Let me know that I'm sitting on a gold mine here!]

Only one thing remains: now that everyone is finished with their articles (and let's face it, once the initial push is done, this knowledgebase is as full as it's going to get), you still need to create the wiki home page! Now how would we go about performing this repetitive task against hundreds, or thousands of regex-matchable wiki pages?

Enter SandmanPowerShell

Did someone say PowerShell? For the skeptics, this is where you make the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" joke. Go ahead; I can take it.

Comments before the code

The following code generates an unordered list of all the wiki articles, with the final goal being me pasting this unordered list directly into the home page. This admittedly is not the most exciting or shocking of PowerShell's uses.

The point is: I wasn't typing this data manually; and I wasn't attempting to use some other semi-automated, semi-manual method of get this data into the wiki home page; and I wasn't writing XSL transforms to display the data dynamically. Actually, XSL sounds like a pretty good idea, now that I think about it.

PowerShell code

Without further ado:

The Grand Finale: did it work?

You be the judge.

Emitted HTML (I pasted this directly from the clipboard):

<ul>
    <li>[[How To Use This Wiki Library]]</li>
     <li>[[Home]]</li>
     <li>[[Previous knowledgebases|Links to all of our previous knowledgebases]]</li>
     <li>[[Possibly incriminating information|Software activation keys]]</li>
     <li>[[Copy-Pasted Email 1|Re: Re: Fwd: Fwd: contact info]]</li>
     <li>[[Copy-Pasted Email 2|Re: Reboot the server?]]</li>
</ul>

Emitted HTML put to use:

Ok, well, it worked. Even for larger than average knowledgebases like my example above, five items aren't enough to justify all this. But, what about for 20 pages?

30?

50?

100?

1000?

etc?

ET CETERA?

At what point does PowerShell become too awesome an option to deny?

I'll wear you down, eventually.

Take-aways

NUMBER ONE: PowerShell is awesome.

NUMBER TWO: Even if you have no intention of using PowerShell, at least realize that through some informally-developed solution, you can work with SharePoint Wiki data programmatically. Whether it's a console application you run on the server, or a Feature you staple to the wiki's Actions menu, or some other Rube Goldberg-esque device, the point is: you can work with SharePoint wikis programmatically.

A short word about wikis (and hackiness)

The example above does not mirror reality; my real-life PowerShell script was much uglier, much hackier, and took almost no time to develop. In this example, I also skipped an intermediate Excel step (yes, Excel). The hackiness of the Excel step was such that it was unfit for publishing.

As for wikis: I'm aware that the wiki home page shouldn't necessarily point to every page in the wiki. I will say this definitively: there is no harm in linking to as much as possible off of the main page, in whatever form, whether it's an unordered list or otherwise.