I’ve recently done some work to talk to Sharepoint with Perl and thought I would share my experiences. I couldn’t find any example code out there in the wild for doing this, so I had to figure a lot of this out by trial and error. It’s actually quite simple once you’ve got it set up. I hope this helps someone.

This code shows you how to connect via the Web Services interface with NTLM authentication (i.e. standard Windows authentication) to manipulate Lists, but you could do almost anything.

You will need:

  • SOAP::Lite for talking to Sharepoint Web Services interface
  • LWP::Authen::Ntlm to enable LWP to talk NTLM
  • Authen::NTLM which LWP::Authen::Ntlm uses for the NTLM authentication

Some information sources that you’ll find useful:

  • MSDN Sharepoint Web Services documentation
  • Go to /_vti_bin/lists.asmx on your Sharepoint server for a lot of useful information
  • Go to /_vti_bin/lists.asmx?WSDL for the WSDL definitions (if all else fails)

So here’s how to get started:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use LWP::Debug;
use SOAP::Lite on_action => sub { "$_[0]$_[1]"; };
import SOAP::Data 'name', 'value';
our $sp_endpoint = 'http://sp.example.com/sites/mysite/_vti_bin/lists.asmx';
our $sp_domain = 'sp.example.com:80';
our $sp_username = 'DOMAIN\username';
our $sp_password = 'xyz';

The SOAP::Lite module needs to be told how to construct the SOAPAction header properly for Sharepoint. The on_action does just this, and means you’ll end up with a SOAPAction appending the URL and the method name together without anything in between (stops the default # that Sharepoint doesn’t want).

if ($debug) {
    LWP::Debug::level('+');
    SOAP::Lite->import(+trace => 'all');
}

Use the above code to turn on debugging if you get errors.

my @ua_args = (keep_alive => 1);
my @credentials = ($sp_domain, "", $sp_endpoint, $sp_password);
my $schema_ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(@ua_args);
$schema_ua->credentials(@credentials);
$soap = SOAP::Lite->proxy($sp_endpoint, @ua_args, credentials => \@credentials);
$soap->schema->useragent($schema_ua);
$soap->uri("http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/");

This complete mess is the necessary steps to get SOAP::Lite to use a properly configured LWP UserAgent to do NTLM authentication. SOAP::Lite uses two UserAgents, one for the main SOAP calls and one for the Schema fetching. Although you don’t need to fetch a schema, I’ve included the proper set up above in case you want to call $soap->service(”$sp_endpoint?WSDL”); for some reason.

$lists = $soap->GetListCollection();
quit(1, $lists->faultstring()) if defined $lists->fault();

That’s all you need to do to get a list of all the lists on your Sharepoint site. And we can print them out:

my @result = $lists->dataof('//GetListCollectionResult/Lists/List');
foreach my $data (@result) {
    my $attr = $data->attr;
    foreach my $a qw/Title Description DefaultViewUrl Name ID WebId ItemCount/ {
        printf "%-16s %s\n", $a, $attr->{$a};
    }
    print "\n";
}

Or if you need to find a particular list to do operations on it, search for it in the results by looking up the Title with something like this:

sub lists_getid
{
    my $title = shift;
    my @result = $lists->dataof('//GetListCollectionResult/Lists/List');
    foreach my $data (@result) {
        my $attr = $data->attr;
        return $attr->{ID} if ($attr->{Title} eq $title);
    }
    return undef;
}

And here’s another useful subroutine to get all the items in a list:

sub lists_getitems
{
    my $listid = shift;
    my $in_listName = name('listName' => $listid);
    my $in_viewName = name('viewName' => '');
    my $in_rowLimit = name('rowLimit' => 99999);
    my $call = $soap->GetListItems($in_listName, $in_viewName, $in_rowLimit);
    quit(1, $call->faultstring()) if defined $call->fault();
    return $call->dataof('//GetListItemsResult/listitems/data/row');
}

That will use the default view. The 99999 is a hack to get all the items and stop the server “paging” the results. Putting this together you’d do something like this:

my $list_id = lists_getid('MyList');
print "List ID is: $list_id\n";
my @items = lists_getitems($list_id);
foreach my $data (@items) {
    my $attr = $data->attr;
    # print Dumper($attr);
}

Here’s some code to add a new list item:

my $field_id = name('Field', 'New')->attr({ Name => 'ID'});
my $field_linktitle = name('Field', $title)->attr({ Name => 'Title'});
my $field_something = name('Field', $something_else)->attr({ Name => 'Something_x0020_Else'});
my $method = name('Method', [$field_id, $field_linktitle, $field_something])->attr({ ID => "anything", Cmd => 'New'});
my $batch = name('Batch', \$method);
my $in_listName = name('listName' => $list_id);
my $in_updates = name('updates' => \$batch);
my $call = $soap->UpdateListItems($in_listName, $in_updates);
quit(1, $call->faultstring()) if defined $call->fault();

The content for Name=”ID” must be “New”. Where it says “anything” it really can be anything, it’s just an identifier for responses. You can also see that spaces are encoded as _x0020_.

my $field_id = name('Field', $sp_id)->attr({ Name => 'ID'});
my $field_something = name('Field', $something_else)->attr({ Name => 'Something_x0020_Else'});
my $method = name('Method', [$field_id, $field_appname])->attr({ ID => $jira_name, Cmd => 'Update'});

The above is for modifying an item. In this case the $sp_id must be set appropriately from the “id” attribute of a list item you previously fetched.

I hope that helps someone. Perhaps one day someone can put the effort in to writing a module to do all this.

James