Want a Good Example of FPRPC? Try SharePad!

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I haven’t blogged for a while, but I’m hoping to make up for it — starting with this…

I’ve told you before that, if you want to add full SharePoint document library support for your own document editor, you'll have to use FrontPage RPCs to do it.  Web Services and WebDAV just won’t cut it.  I also said we’d do more about showing you how to go about it.

I wasn’t kidding.  Head on over to the SharePad project on GotDotNet.  I’ll take a little credit for concept, specifications, and funding, but the real work to date has been done by our friends at The Interlink Group. 

Would you like a complete, ready-to-use example of how to:

  • Open a file that’s stored in a SharePoint document library?
  • Save a file to a SharePoint document library?
  • Navigate through the libraries in a SharePoint site?
  • Check out the file?
  • Check in the file?
  • Register it within the WSS/SPS environment so it launches your editor automatically (like we do for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents)?
  • Set custom properties on the file as you save it?
  • Read a file’s custom properties at the time you open it?

Of course you would.  Go get it.  Then come back in about two weeks and get it again, because we still have a little bit more code to write before we’re finished with the part that gets/sets custom properties at open/save time.  How to do it is known, so it’s just a matter of a code/test pass.  We use simple text files (with a custom extension of our own) as the example file format.

If you’re an ISV with a document format and editor of your own — get this code and adapt it to your needs.  We want you to be able to use SharePoint document libraries to the fullest.  If you’re an application developer and you want to see how we use FrontPage RPCs, steal that code and ignore the document editor stuff.  There’s something here for everyone.