SharePoint Lists are great. They are really easy to setup, customize and allow for very easy data input from your users. Sometimes however you need to get the SharePoint List data into another system so that people can work with the data with tools and knowledge they have. Although this can be achieved in a number of manual ways, having an automated way of exporting a SharePoint List is something a few of our customers have asked for. This is now something that can be achieved using the Lightning Data Masher and creating an export job.
In this walk through we’ll make use of a standard contacts list within SharePoint. Your SharePoint users are editing the information in the list, but you need to get it out into a Microsoft SQL Server table so it can be used in other legacy applications. Our database table is designed as such:
Once you have installed and deployed the Lightning Data Masher, browse to your SharePoint List and from the Actions menu click on ‘Create an export’ link
Select the data source type that you want to export to, and enter the connection string. Then click on the ‘Connect to Data Source’ button.
Enter a Title and Description for your job. Make this as meaningful as possible as if you have a number of import/export jobs running in a SharePoint site it is important to be able to distinguish them.
You can select to use an existing database table, or allow the Lightning Data Masher to create a new table for you the first time the export job executes. As our database table is already created we’ll use the ‘Use existing table option’
Now we need to map our SharePoint List columns to our database table. Click the ‘Add Column Mapping’ button for the amount of columns you wish to map.
Finally all you need to do is set how often you’d like the export job to run. Every time it runs it will add new rows of data into the database table and update any that may have changes.
Please check out our other walk through of how to Import to a SharePoint List.
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