Wednesday 31 October 2007

Using a Workflow to copy list items from one website to another

We currently have a requirement to implement staged environment. On a particular web application we want to be able to submit certain documents /forms semi-anonymously (thus exposing thus being able to expose this site to the Internet, although it won't be completely anonymous), with items from this webapp then being copied into an "internal" web application, which is used to allow internal users to administer submitted documents.

The issue here is that the two applications will have to different authentication mechanisms, therefore we need a way to copy list items from the "front" to the "backend" web application.

To do this we think the best way is to implement a Visual Studio workflow to do this. As i first started my research, I couldn't find any good references. However as I started digging into the SDK I came across the CopyFrom method of the SPListItem object. As I investigated what the CopyForm method does exactly, I came across the following sites which give the basics of copying list items from one site to another.

http://k2distillery.blogspot.com/2007/10/copy-version-history-with_5.html

which refers to the site:

http://glorix.blogspot.com/2007/03/spd-workflow-activity-copying-listitem.html

I'm hoping that someone looking for this solution will find it easier to find this information to do this.