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Adding items to a SharePoint list using UpdateList

I've come across a SharePoint problem that I hope someone can help with. Basically, when I am trying to add a column called "MigratedChemist" to a list called "WorkCards" (pListName in the method parameters). No matter what I try I am getting a FaultException error raised when calling UpdateList. I am connecting using the SharePoint web service. I have confirmed the following:
The column doesn't already exist and I do have permissions to create it in SharePoint
The connection to SharePoint is established corectly to /_vti_bin/lists.asmx
The list name is correct as I have another method which returns items from the list and that works perfectly.
The xVersion and xId values are set correctly when the program runs and passed as parameters - as far as I am concerned I should just be able to pass the list name, as opposed to the GUID, but neither method works.
My code is as follows:
public static bool AddColumnToList(string pUri, string pListName, string pViewName, string pMaxRecords)
{
string version = string.Empty;
XAttribute xId = null;
XAttribute xVersion = null;
try
{
XElement listDetails = client.GetList(pListName);
xVersion = listDetails.Attribute("Version");
xId = listDetails.Attribute("ID");
}
catch { throw; }
XElement ndNewFields = new XElement ("Fields", "");
string newXml = "<Method ID='1' Cmd='New'><Field Name='MigratedChemist' Type='Text' DisplayName='MigratedChemist' /></Method></Fields>";
ndNewFields.Add(newXml);
XElement result;
try
{
result = client.UpdateList(xId.Value, null, ndNewFields, null, null, xVersion.Value);
}
catch (FaultException fe)
{
}
return true;
}
In addition to this does anyone know how to get any decent information from FaultRequest? At the moment I get the following error message, which is of no use and there appears to be no extra detail. I have tried, as some have suggested removing the error handling and letting the program halt, but that doesn't give me any extra information either.
{"Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was thrown."}

For future reference I have solved both the problem of the SharePoint update failing AND the FaultException problem, so am including it here for posterity:
Problem 1 - Problem with UpdateList
This problem was caused because my XML was malformed. When I called ndNewFields.Add(newXml) then XML that was being returned was replacing < and > than with control characters, as shown below (I have added an extra space because this editor converts them automatically.
<Method ID="1" Cmd="New"&gt ;&lt ;Field Name="MigratedChemist"&gt ;&lt ;/Field&gt ;&lt ;/Method&gt ;
Now, I did notice this pretty early on but wasn't sure whether it would cause a problem or not. However using the XElement.Parse command I was able to remove these characters and this resolved the problem:
ndNewFields.Add(XElement.Parse (newXml));
Problem 2 - Problem with the SharePoint error coming back as FaultException
This has been bugging for me ages so I am glad I have finally solved it. I can't take credit for it, as I took it from another page, but the following code was how I got the details.
catch (FaultException fe)
{
MessageFault msgFault = fe.CreateMessageFault();
XmlElement elm = msgFault.GetDetail<XmlElement>();
}
Hopefully this will save someone some frustration in the future!
Andrew

AccessViolationException when accessing the Above, Below, Suffix, and Prefix properties of a Dimension

In Revit 2013 I have tool that I'm making that copies dimensions from one drafting view to another. I've got it to properly create a new version of a dimension including the Curve, DimensionType, and References but I'm having trouble with the properties Above, Below, Prefix, and Suffix. They copy just fine if at least one of them has a value. However, if none of them have a value then it will throw an AccessViolationException when I try to access them. I have tried to catch that exception but it bubbles up and it crashes Revit (I'm assuming it's caused by native code that fails).
How can I check to see if these properties have any value when I do my copying without triggering this AccessViolationException?
Autodesk Discussion Group Question
The DimensionData class is my own used for storing the dimension information so that it can be used to create the dimension in a separate document.
private IEnumerable<DimensionData> GetDimensionDataSet(Document document,
View view)
{
if (document == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("document");
if (view == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("view");
List<DimensionData> dimensionDataSet = new List<DimensionData>();
FilteredElementCollector dimensionCollector =
new FilteredElementCollector(document, view.Id);
dimensionCollector.OfClass(typeof(Dimension));
foreach (Dimension oldDimension in dimensionCollector)
{
Line oldDimensionLine = (Line)oldDimension.Curve;
string dimensionTypeName = oldDimension.DimensionType.Name;
List<ElementId> oldReferences = new List<ElementId>();
foreach (Reference oldReference in oldDimension.References)
oldReferences.Add(oldReference.ElementId);
DimensionData dimensionData;
try
{
string prefix = oldDimension.Prefix;
dimensionData = new DimensionData(oldDimensionLine,
oldReferences,
dimensionTypeName,
prefix,
oldDimension.Suffix,
oldDimension.Above,
oldDimension.Below);
}
catch (AccessViolationException)
{
dimensionData = new DimensionData(oldDimensionLine,
oldReferences, dimensionTypeName);
}
dimensionDataSet.Add(dimensionData);
}
return dimensionDataSet;
}

Regarding transactions: As far as I'm aware, you are only required to be inside a transaction when you are making any sort of CHANGE (modifications, deletions, additions). If all you are doing is collecting dimension information, you would not need a transaction, but when you use that information to create new dimensions in another document, that code would have to be inside a transaction. I have had a number of programs under development which did not yet modify the document but simply collected parameter settings and posted them to a TaskDialog.Show(). These programs worked fine, and I don't see anything in your code that actually modifies your model, so that doesn't seem to be your issue.

It seems like I bug.
Can you post the issue to the ADN Support?
The solution I can suggest is to use Parameters of the Dimension element instead of Dimension class properties.
For example, you can get Suffix and Prefix by following code
var suffixParameter =
oldDimension.get_Parameter(BuiltInParameter.SPOT_SLOPE_SUFFIX);
string suffix = null;
if (suffixParameter != null)
{
suffix = suffixParameter.AsString();
}
var prefixParameter =
oldDimension.get_Parameter(BuiltInParameter.SPOT_SLOPE_PREFIX);
string prefix = null;
if (prefixParameter != null)
{
prefix = prefixParameter.AsString();
}
Unfortunatelly, I don't tell you how to get Above and Below Properties via parameters, because I don't have a project to test. But you can easily determine parameters using BuiltInParameter Checker
Hope it helps.

Process taking lots of time in foreach loop in C#

I am using C# code and Tridion(CMS) classes to fetch data from Tridion, below is the code to get all the publications List from Tridion.
protected void btnPublishPublicationList_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
try
{
PublicationBL pubBL = new PublicationBL();
TridionCollection<Publication> pubAllList = pubBL.getAllPublicationList();
List<PublicationsBO> pubBos = new List<PublicationsBO>();
foreach (Publication pub in pubAllList)
{
if ((pub.Title.StartsWith("07"))||(pub.Title.StartsWith("08")))
{
PublicationsBO pubBO = new PublicationsBO();
pubBO.publicationID = pub.ID;
pubBO.publicationName = pub.Title;
pubBos.Add(pubBO);
}
}
pubBL.createPublicationListXML(pubBos);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
log.Error(ex.Message);
}
}
In above code on the button click, I am using .net code and using Tridion class to get all the publications List as below:
TridionCollection<Publication> pubAllList = pubBL.getAllPublicationList();
I am getting my all the publications list very fast from the Tridion, however when I am going for foreach loop as below my process gets stuck and it takes lots of time to do this.
foreach (Publication pub in pubAllList)
{
if ((pub.Title.StartsWith("07"))||(pub.Title.StartsWith("08")))
{
PublicationsBO pubBO = new PublicationsBO();
pubBO.publicationID = pub.ID;
pubBO.publicationName = pub.Title;
pubBos.Add(pubBO);
}
}
After debugging I found that when debugger comes to foreach (Publication pub in pubAllList) it is taking lots of time. I think while making the Publication class object is taking time and it is Tridion class.
Please suggest any other way to do this or suggest what is wrong in above code.
Thanks.

It is indeed because of Tridion's lazy-loading. If all you need is a list of Publication IDs and Titles, I'd recommend using:
TDSE tdse = new TDSEClass():
XmlDocument publicationList = new XmlDocument();
publicationList.LoadXml(tdse.GetListPublications(ListColumnFilter.XMLListIDAndTitle));
This will give you an XML document containing a list of all publications (/tcm:ListPublications/tcm:Item), and each Item will contain a Title and ID attributes.
If you need more detail than just ID and Title, then you will have to individually load each publication, which you can do by using the ID attribute tdse.GetObject().
Hope this helps.
N

according to this which I think is the developers site... it looks like getAllPublicationList is using some sort of lazy loading so even though you have the collection you don't really have the items in it.
It appears that you can set filters on their collection rather than after the fact so that it will only load the records you are interested in.
to clarify, lazy loading means that when the collection is returned the data needed to populate the items in it are not yet laded. It isn't until you access the item in the collection that the data (e.g. by creating a Publication item) for that item is actually loaded. The purpose for using a lazy collection is to allow filtering on the collection so that unnecessary expensive loads can be avoided.
HTH

Html parser to get blog posts

I need to create a html parser, that given a blog url, it returns a list, with all the posts in the page.
I.e. if a page has 10 posts, it
should return a list of 10 divs,
where each div contains h1 and
a p
I can't use its rss feed, because I need to know exactly how it looks like for the user, if it has any ad, image etc and in contrast some blogs have just a summary of its content and the feed has it all, and vice-versa.
Anyway, I've made one that download its feed, and search the html for similar content, it works very well for some blogs, but not for others.
I don't think I can make a parser that works for 100% of the blogs it parses, but I want to make the best possible.
What should be the best approach? Look for tags that have its id attribute equal "post", "content"? Look for p tags? etc etc etc...
Thanks in advance for any help!

I don't think you will be successful on that. You might be able to parse one blog, but if the blog engine changes stuff, it won't work any more. I also don't think you'll be able to write a generic parser. You might even be partially successful, but it's going to be an ethereal success, because everything is so error prone on this context. If you need content, you should go with RSS. If you need to store (simply store) how it looks, you can also do that. But parsing by the way it looks? I don't see concrete success on that.

"Best possible" turns out to be "best reasonable," and you get to define what is reasonable. You can get a very large number of blogs by looking at how common blogging tools (WordPress, LiveJournal, etc.) generate their pages, and code specially for each one.
The general case turns out to be a very hard problem because every blogging tool has its own format. You might be able to infer things using "standard" identifiers like "post", "content", etc., but it's doubtful.
You'll also have difficulty with ads. A lot of ads are generated with JavaScript. So downloading the page will give you just the JavaScript code rather than the HTML that gets generated. If you really want to identify the ads, you'll have to identify the JavaScript code that generates them. Or, your program will have to execute the JavaScript to create the final DOM. And then you're faced with a problem similar to that above: figuring out if some particular bit of HTML is an ad.
There are heuristic methods that are somewhat successful. Check out Identifying a Page's Primary Content for answers to a similar question.

Use the HTML Agility pack. It is an HTML parser made for this.

I just did something like this for our company's blog which uses wordpress. This is good for us because our wordress blog hasn't changed in years, but the others are right in that if your html changes a lot, parsing becomes a cumbersome solution.
Here is what I recommend:
Using Nuget install RestSharp and HtmlAgilityPack. Then download fizzler and include those references in your project (http://code.google.com/p/fizzler/downloads/list).
Here is some sample code I used to implement the blog's search on my site.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Fizzler.Systems.HtmlAgilityPack;
using RestSharp;
using RestSharp.Contrib;
namespace BlogSearch
{
public class BlogSearcher
{
const string Site = "http://yourblog.com";
public static List<SearchResult> Get(string searchTerms, int count=10)
{
var searchResults = new List<SearchResult>();
var client = new RestSharp.RestClient(Site);
//note 10 is the page size for the search results
var pages = (int)Math.Ceiling((double)count/10);
for (int page = 1; page <= pages; page++)
{
var request = new RestSharp.RestRequest
{
Method = Method.GET,
//the part after .com/
Resource = "page/" + page
};
//Your search params here
request.AddParameter("s", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(searchTerms));
var res = client.Execute(request);
searchResults.AddRange(ParseHtml(res.Content));
}
return searchResults;
}
public static List<SearchResult> ParseHtml(string html)
{
var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
var results = doc.DocumentNode.QuerySelectorAll("#content-main > div");
var searchResults = new List<SearchResult>();
foreach(var node in results)
{
bool add = false;
var sr = new SearchResult();
var a = node.QuerySelector(".posttitle > h2 > a");
if (a != null)
{
add = true;
sr.Title = a.InnerText;
sr.Link = a.Attributes["href"].Value;
}
var p = node.QuerySelector(".entry > p");
if (p != null)
{
add = true;
sr.Exceprt = p.InnerText;
}
if(add)
searchResults.Add(sr);
}
return searchResults;
}
}
public class SearchResult
{
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Link { get; set; }
public string Exceprt { get; set; }
}
}
Good luck,
Eric

How to access WinRM in C#

I'd like to create a small application that can collect system information (Win32_blablabla) using WinRM as opposed to WMI. How can i do that from C#?
The main goal is to use WS-Man (WinRm) as opposed to DCOM (WMI).

I guess the easiest way would be to use WSMAN automation. Reference wsmauto.dll from windwos\system32 in your project:
then, code below should work for you. API description is here: msdn: WinRM C++ API
IWSMan wsman = new WSManClass();
IWSManConnectionOptions options = (IWSManConnectionOptions)wsman.CreateConnectionOptions();
if (options != null)
{
try
{
// options.UserName = ???;
// options.Password = ???;
IWSManSession session = (IWSManSession)wsman.CreateSession("http://<your_server_name>/wsman", 0, options);
if (session != null)
{
try
{
// retrieve the Win32_Service xml representation
var reply = session.Get("http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wsman/1/wmi/root/cimv2/Win32_Service?Name=winmgmt", 0);
// parse xml and dump service name and description
var doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(reply);
foreach (var elementName in new string[] { "p:Caption", "p:Description" })
{
var node = doc.GetElementsByTagName(elementName)[0];
if (node != null) Console.WriteLine(node.InnerText);
}
}
finally
{
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(session);
}
}
}
finally
{
Marshal.ReleaseComObject(options);
}
}
hope this helps, regards

I've got an article that describes an easy way to run Powershell through WinRM from .NET at http://getthinktank.com/2015/06/22/naos-winrm-windows-remote-management-through-net/.
The code is in a single file if you want to just copy it and it's also a NuGet package that includes the reference to System.Management.Automation.
It auto manages trusted hosts, can run script blocks, and also send files (which isn't really supported but I created a work around). The returns are always the raw objects from Powershell.
// this is the entrypoint to interact with the system (interfaced for testing).
var machineManager = new MachineManager(
"10.0.0.1",
"Administrator",
MachineManager.ConvertStringToSecureString("xxx"),
true);
// will perform a user initiated reboot.
machineManager.Reboot();
// can run random script blocks WITH parameters.
var fileObjects = machineManager.RunScript(
"{ param($path) ls $path }",
new[] { #"C:\PathToList" });
// can transfer files to the remote server (over WinRM's protocol!).
var localFilePath = #"D:\Temp\BigFileLocal.nupkg";
var fileBytes = File.ReadAllBytes(localFilePath);
var remoteFilePath = #"D:\Temp\BigFileRemote.nupkg";
machineManager.SendFile(remoteFilePath, fileBytes);
Hope this helps, I've been using this for a while with my automated deployments. Please leave comments if you find issues.

I would like to note that this shows an interop error by default in Visual Studio 2010.
c.f. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mshneer/archive/2009/12/07/interop-type-xxx-cannot-be-embedded-use-the-applicable-interface-instead.aspx
There appear to be two ways to solve this. This first is documented in the article listed above and appears to be the correct way to handle the problem. The pertinent changes for this example is:
WSMan wsManObject = new WSMan();
This is in lieu of IWSMan wsman = new WSManClass(); which will throw the error.
The second resolution is to go to the VS2010—>Solution Explorer—>Solution—>Project—>References and select WSManAutomation. Right click or hit Alt-Enter to access the properties. Change the value of the "Embed Interop Types" property of the wsmauto reference.