In response to a question from a reader, Tim, this is a follow-up from an earlier article on SharePoint, SOAP and VBScript. This time, we'll look at how to do more complex calls to SharePoint web services in VBScript

Some web services in SharePoint require passing XML as parameters. Unfortunately, you can't pass an XML document, it has to be an XML node element, and this takes a bit of effort to construct in VBScript.

The example we'll use is making a call to GetListItems, which returns all items in a SharePoint library, optionally matching a query formatted using a special XML syntax.

To correctly call this web service, create a VBScript file with the following lines:

Dim xmlDoc, SOAPClient

Set xmlDoc = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.5.0")
xmlDoc.async = False
xmlDoc.loadXML( _
   "" + _
   "  " + "1" + _
   "  " + _
   "  " + _
   "" )

Set SOAPClient = CreateObject("MSSOAP.SOAPClient")
SOAPClient.mssoapinit 
"http://sharepoint.alentus.com/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx?WSDL"

Dim result
Set result = SOAPClient.GetListItems( "Tasks", "", _
   xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("Query"), _
   xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("ViewFields"), "", _
   xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("QueryOptions"), "" )

DisplayNode result.childNodes

There are a number of ways to create and retrieve XML nodes, of course, but this way has the benefit of being fairly concise and self-explanatory.