Camlpiler

Overview

Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) is an XML-based language used in SharePoint for querying lists, defining views, defining list fields, and other tasks.

Camlpiler is a JavaScript library that will take a CAML query and convert it to a filter function that can be applied to JavaScript objects.

Use Cases

Building a dev API

The primary motivation for creating this library was to make it easier to create a development API that could mimic requests to a SharePoint server. Basically, in a React app deployed to SharePoint, I was using a local store of JavaScript objects to mimic the production store in SharePoint. This was easy to implement for basic operations such as get/save/delete, but ran into a problem when searching/filtering because that required dealing with CAML.

Validating CamlQuery syntax (not ready yet)

SharePoint in general does not give helpful error messages when presented with incorrect Syntax in a CAML query, whether it's malformed XML, a misspelled element name, or any other sort of error. While this is a secondary use case, and not the reason I wrote this library, I do hope that as this library becomes more feature complete that this will become a potential use for it, especially for the case of generated CAML queries.

Getting Started

Installation

Install via npm or yarn using one of the following commands:

npm

npm install camlpiler

yarn

yarn add camlpiler

Usage

Camlpiler is intended to be used when running your project in development mode, for example if you're running an App created with create-react-app using the local development server via the command npm start. In this scenario, camlpiler is intended to replicate the SharePoint CAML parsing functionality.

As a somewhat simplified example, here is a somewhat contrived sample usage in a SharePoint-hosted JavaScript application:

const search = (term: string): Promise<ItemType[]> => {
    const query =
        `<View>
            <Query>
                <Where>
                    <Contains>
                        <FieldRef Name='Title' />
                        <Value Type='Text'>${term}</Value>
                    </Contains>
                </Where>
            </Query>
        </View>`;
    if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development' || process.env.NODE_ENV === 'test') {
        const camlTester = new CamlTester({});
        return camlTester.testQueryXml(testItems, query);
    } else {
        return promiseBasedSharePointWrapper.search(term);
    }
}