Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

1030 Part X: Microsoft Office 2003 Integration with SharePoint Products and Technologies
When you interact with the Jet engine directly through VBA, you need to match them
manually. The long string in the example that starts with "Windows SharePoint Services"
and ends with "TABLE=Parts" identifies a particular SharePoint list.
To programmatically import or add links to data in Windows SharePoint Services,
there are two ways to identify the correct GUID. The easy way is to add a link
manually between the desired SharePoint list and the Access database, and then
open the linked table in design view. The Description property of the linked table
contains the necessary linking string. Obviously, this is less than useful when linking
to arbitrary lists. You can also use the Windows SharePoint Services Web service
interface to Windows SharePoint Services, which exposes a Lists.GetList method. This
method gets the name of a list on a specified SharePoint site and returns detailed
information, including the GUID that identifies the list. The Windows SharePoint
Services Web service interface is discussed in more detail later in this document.
If you created a link between a SharePoint list and an Access database, you can
work with it just like any other table. You can execute SQL statements to retrieve or
change data, or open a Recordset and manipulate the list programmatically. Access
treats the SharePoint list similar to another table and all the table-oriented code you
already know works. An optimistic locking model coordinates concurrency issues,
such as when two users work with the same data at the same time between Windows
SharePoint Services and Access.
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Integration
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 also integrates with SharePoint lists by implementing an
extension to the Excel 2003 object model to make working with lists distinct from
other activities. The Worksheet object in Excel is extended with a ListObjects collection
that contains individual ListObject objects. The ListObject contains collections of
ListColumns and ListRows, and the individual ListColumn and ListRow objects have
properties that tie them to Excel Range objects.
By default, the ListObjects collection contains native Excel 2003 lists. But you
can hook up one of these lists to a SharePoint site by calling the Publish method of
the corresponding ListObject object.
To create a list from the rectangular area extending from A1 to C8, you could
run the following VBA code:
Public Sub PublishList()
' Get the collection of lists for the active sheet
Dim L As ListObjects
Set L = ActiveSheet.ListObjects
' Add a new list
Dim NewList As ListObject
Set NewList = L.Add(xlSrcRange, Range("A1:C8"), , True)
NewList.Name = "PartsList"
' Publish it to a SharePoint site
NewList.Publish Array("http://server_name/sites/site_name", _
"NewParts"), True
End Sub