Enesys RS Data Extension V3.1

This new version includes the following main new features and changes:

Handling large lists

Version 3.1 introduces a new mechanism for retrieving list’s items in chunks of the specified number of items (4 000 when this number is not specified). This new approach will make it possible to handle large lists without causing the SharePoint web service to return an “out of memory” exception.

Client and Server configuration tools

Starting from version 3.1, you won’t have to tweak configuration files anymore for configuring your SQL Server Reporting Services server. Configuring your Report Server will be just a matter of running our installation program on the server, Launch the Server Configuration tool, select the SSRS instance and click on install:

This server Configuration tool will also provide with all the necessary information regarding your server installation:

On par with the Server Configuration tool, a new client configuration tool will be available for configuring or correct any configuration issue with your BIDS installation:

SharePoint admin data

In the new version (for the standard and enterprise edition only), you will discover new statements to retrieve SharePoint administration/configuration data such as site collection, site columns, site permissions, list collection, list columns, list permissions, …

We have called those statements administrative statements to differentiate them from statements used to retrieve business data from lists.

Those statements will allow you to design your own reports for providing in depth information about sites, lists, columns, content types and permissions. In this release, we will be providing a ready to use reporting solution that provides various reports starting from all sites in one or more site collection. The reports are all linked together so that you can access all other reports from a master report.

Of course, you are not limited to straight reports over administrative data. Those statements benefit from our query architecture and the data resulting from those statements can be joined, aggregated, transformed using sqlQuery statements. It will therefore be possible to issue more specific queries like:

• lists that have been modified during the last “x” days within the entire site collection,
• lists that have not been modified for months,
• sites for which custom site columns have been created,
• lists that have one or more lookup columns,
• permissions of a specific SharePoint group over a whole site collection,…

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing such specific reports that you will be able to use with your own SharePoint installation.

Querying XML data

This new statement will let you retrieve XML data and let you manipulate it within an “Enesys RS Data Extension” query.

For example, the following query will retrieve articles with titles that contain the word “repository” from codebetter rss feed.

It opens up quite interesting possibilities in the sense that it makes it possible to join/merge/aggregate any kind of data just by writing some logic available through an url.

In fact, besides retrieving SharePoint data, you could use Enesys RS Data Extension to aggregate disparate data from various sources and manipulate this data using SQL Select statements.

In the coming weeks, we will be providing a few sample applications that take advantage of the new xmlQuery statement.