SharePoint, Document Library and SQL Server

It’s been years now, SharePoint 2007 is about to appear in the market, SharePoint 2003 seems to be something that is history now (Exaggerating …). Many companies have adopted SharePoint during the last one year. Good thing is that I have seen lots of small businesses acquiring SharePoint during the last one year. SharePoint’s popularity is growing day by day and it is considered to be a top level portal product.

Document Libraries are collections of files that you can share with team members on a web based on Windows SharePoint services. Want to know more about Document Libraries?? Read more about Document Libraries on this site:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/assistance/ha011412871033.aspx

This link will show you how to create and use a document library. You can extend the functionality of these document libraries by using the “Event Handler Toolkit” that can be downloaded from the Microsoft site:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4B2C2F1B-D74A-482A-903A-45BB44C5DEC4&displaylang=en

Suppose, whenever a document is added in the document library, you want to store the name of the document and the time it was added, in the database. How can you do that? Why would you do that? You can capture events fired in the document library. When ever a document is added, updated, deleted, etc, you can capture the event and add your own business logic or simply capture document information and store it in the database. Why would you store document information in the database? Well, there can be many reasons. You may want to create reports for the senior management who may want to look at the documents added to the library from time to time. You may want to track the document history or you may want to add a workflow to your document library. All this can be done by using the “Event Handler Toolkit”.

Before, we proceed, let me tell you the purpose of writing this. There are many excellent articles on the internet that show you how to capture document library events and do processing but still many people come to me and ask me the same question again and again and the question is related to the capturing of document information and storing it in SQL Server. Seeing the demand, I decided to write a small article that will show you how you can capture the document information in the library and store it in SQL Server. You can do so many things, for example:

1. When a document is added, you can copy or move it to another document library.
2. You can delete a document.
3. You can capture document information and store it in SQL Server.
4. You can update document information by updating the properties associated with the document.
5. You can add workflow mechanism to your document library. For example, when a document is added to the document library, you send an email to the approver and ask him to approve the document. Document, after getting approval from approver 1, goes to approver 2 and so on.

These are only some of the important things that you can do with Document Library EventHandler. I wish I could show you all of the above in my article but unfortunately that is not possible due to shortage of time but I promise I will try my best to update this tutorial from time to time and add more content to it. In this article, we will see how you can capture document information when a document is inserted in the library and store this information in a DB.