Querying subfolders in SharePoint lists using SPAPI and GetListItems()
by admin on Nov.11, 2009, under Programming, SharePoint
This took a while to figure out. I’ve been trying to query the SharePoint lists service using getListItems().
Getting something from inside one folder is easy — you just set the queryOptions parameter to be <QueryOptions><Folder>folderName</Folder></QueryOptions>.
This works and returns items fron within that folder. But what about subfolders?
One would expect it to be simple — but it is not, replacing folderName with folderName\subFolder does not work — it still returns items from within folderName.
The solution is simple but non-obvious. For sub-folders, you have to include the name of the list as the first path element — so the query becomes <QueryOptions><Folder>listName\folderName\subFolder</Folder></QueryOptions>
This doesn’t seem to be covered in any documentation, and is non-obvious, inconsistent behaviour. It resulted in a lot of wasted time for me. Unsurprising really for the over-complex, proprietary, non-standard mess that is SharePoint.
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April 1st, 2010 on 4:20 pm
thanks man, I was also having a hard time with this - i’m hating sharepoint at the moment but at least your article saved me a struggle.
May 19th, 2010 on 10:05 pm
Thanks a bunch. This helped me a lot too.
Also just to note, I was running this using the folder path from another query and when getListItems returns the results “ows_FileDirRef” has the folder id added to the front like this “17;#listName\folderName\subFolder”, so if you want to use it you have to remove it with something like “result.Substring(result.IndexOf(’#')+1)”