Showing posts with label iCustomMapping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iCustomMapping. Show all posts

Friday 8 October 2010

Extending SPMetal - Retrieving Attachments from SharePoint Lists

Problem: LINQ to SharePoint does not support attachments by default.
Hypothesis: Traditional Server Object Model approach to retrieving a specific list item’s attachments.  Approach is shown below:
Resolution: Use a partial class as described by Andrew Connell to use Linq to SharePoint to work with attachments. You could hydrate the attachment (SPFile objects) in the parital class but I choose not to, in case someone in the development team used the extended mapped property for retrieving a large list. This uses the Server object model and the hydration process is extremely heavy.  This method allows me to know if there are attachments, how many and where I can get them.  With this information I only get the specific SPFile objects if I need to work with the object.  Outlined are the steps to extend LINQ to SharePoint to retrieve attachment associated to items in a list.

1) Extend the SPMetal generated proxy class
2) Get a specific item using the LINQ to SharePoint model and using the String array returned by the extended class, get the file objects using SharePoint’s server side object model.
Tip: attachments is a string array, not an array of SPFile objects. The attachements.UrlPrefix property can be used to hydrate the SPFile objects for the list item.

Tip: I upload attachments using the Dialog framework point to attachfile.aspx as it does all the work for me.
_layouts/attachfile.aspx?ListId={5555D16F-5559-4CE4-555E-F5B0E9DC5555}&IsDlg=1&ItemId=