Question

I have a SharePoint 2007 custom list that I have saved as a list template. I am looking for a way to create a new list from the saved template via a web service call from an outside application.

I have already looked into the the basic web services available for SharePoint 2007 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb862916(office.12).aspx but a call to that just creates a simple, empty custom list.

How do I instantiate a list from a specific template? How do I locate the Feature ID for the template?

Answer 1

You can use a HTTP debugger like fiddler2 to analyze the web service and remote procedure calls that SharePoint Designer makes to find this out.

For example, to get the available list templates, SPD makes an HTTP request using the DisplayPost RPC command, e.g.

POST http://[server]/[web]/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=DisplayPost 

with an xml payload of:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ows:Batch OnError="Return" Version="12.0.0.000">
 <Method ID="0,GetProjSchema">
  <SetVar Name="Cmd">GetProjSchema</SetVar>
 </Method>
</ows:Batch>

SPD then parses the ListTemplates node in the response to obtain a list of template names, types, and feature IDs.

To create the list from a specific template type or feature ID, SPD uses the same DisplayPost command, this time with a message body similar to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ows:Batch OnError="Return" Version="12.0.0.000">
 <Method ID="0,NewList">
  <SetVar Name="Cmd">NewList</SetVar>
  <SetVar Name="ListTemplate">108</SetVar>
  <SetVar Name="Title">Discussion Board</SetVar>
  <SetVar Name="FeatureId">00bfea716a4943fab535d15c05500108</SetVar>
  <SetVar Name="RootFolder" />
  <SetVar Name="LangID">1033</SetVar>
 </Method>
</ows:Batch>

For an example of how to use the RPC protocol see this post on uploading files to a SharePoint document library (it uses the author.dll rather than the owssvr.dll, but the technique is similar).