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.
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.
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.
Install via npm or yarn using one of the following commands:
npm install camlpiler
yarn add camlpiler
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(query);
}
}