Wednesday, May 29, 2013

SharePoint 2013 CAML Query Designer - It's not only CAML query builder... More than that...

Karine Bosch and Andy van Steenbergen created new caml query designer. We can download it from biwug site by clicking on downloads and select caml designer.
SharePoint 2013 caml designer provides many more features including all features of SharePoint 2010 caml query builder with nice look and feel. Here is some screen shots with explanation.
Download the caml builder into your Dev server, select the .exe file and run as administrator.


CAML designer 2013 contains language interoperability. By default it is set to English. On the top left we can see two options CAML and Site Data Query to get queries. In the Top of the right side we can see Connection link and settings link with Refresh, Twitter follow us, Help.



By clicking on the settings link, we can see two tabs to set general and display settings as shown in the images below.



In the general settings, it allows us to clear the history and language settings. In display settings we have the option to set the background colors and lighting view.
By clicking on the connection link, we can see connection types (Server OM, Client OM, Web Services) and SharePoint version (SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2010, Office 365) and the authentication credentials (Current user or allows us to enter the credentials) as shown in the image below.


For SharePoint 2010, we can see only Client OM, Web services options. (I think caml designer is detecting the current installed SharePoint version. So that it is not showing Server OM for SharePoint 2010).


For SharePoint 2013, we can see Server OM, Client OM, web services options as shown below.


For Office 365, we have Client OM and Web services options.


Here I have selected SharePoint 2013, Server Om and current User credentials. By clicking on the connect button, it will connects the SharePoint site. While connecting SharePoint site shows the message “Trying to connect….” As shown in the image below.

After connecting the site, it shows all the lists and libraries on the site as shows in the image.


Select a list for caml query; we have drag and options for view fields as shown in the image below.


Drag and drop the fields to see in the results.

In the “Order By” tab select the field to show in the order.


In the “Where” tab, select the options or logic by dragging the fields and setting the logic.


“Query Options” tab allows us to select the options.


We can results finally in “Test” tab for all these customization.


On the bottom window we can see CAML Query for customized logic. We can also see  Server OM code, .Net Client Object model code, Rest Client Object Model code as well as Web services. As shown in the images below.


In the Rest Services we have two options, JSON, ATOM as per the required result type.

You can see more explanation on CAML Query designer here
   



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