Metadata update BI4 vs Sharepoint

With the implementation of BI4, our company moved from producing .xls files to .xlsx files. All good and well, but that brings some unexpected consequences as well.


Every day, we produce some 80 reports, that get stored on a SharePoint Server. Every file has some custom properties in SharePoint, like a periodicity and a Group.


With .XLS files, this metadata gets stored on one place only : SharePoint. However, when you work with .XLSX files, you may run into some trouble -- because the Metadata is then stored INSIDE the document. Given the fact that some of the properties are custom, there is no way to update the metadata, until you have actually uploaded the document to SharePoint -- and if that file came from Business Objects, you just overwrote your Metadata with BLANKS.


This article will provide you with a work-around.


=========================


First some VBScript code:


       Set oBook = oExcel.Workbooks.Open(objFile)
       oBook.saveas strDestFolder & Replace(objFile.Name, "$", "\"), 51
       oBook.ContentTypeProperties("Group").Value = sGroup
       oBook.ContentTypeProperties("Period").Value = sPeriod
       oBook.ContentTypeProperties("Description").Value = sDescription
       oExcel.AutomationSecurity = 1
       oBook.save
       oBook.close
       oExcel.quit


Before you implement this, you will be needing to write a script that will copy your Excel documents to SharePoint. If you need help with that part, probably the above code will do you little good.


It took me a good deal of time, to write the code above -- very happy with it. What I'm doing in the rest of the script is run through a text-file to locate the file I'm copying --and I store the current description and group in it.


The script above will then store that onto the SharePoint server, after saving the file to that location.


For you Powershell lovers:


$objFile = $objExcel.workbooks.open($OutFile)
            $builtinProperties = $objFile.ContentTypeProperties
            foreach($builtinProperty in $builtinProperties){
                if ($builtinProperty.Name -eq "Description"){
                    $builtinProperty.value = $Description
                }
                if ($builtinProperty.Name -eq "Period"){
                    $builtinProperty.value = $Period
                }
                if ($builtinProperty.Name -eq "Group"){
                    if($group[1] -eq "B00"){                    
                        $builtinProperty.value = "Bank"
                    }
                }
           }
           $objFile.Save()


I have no good PowerShell editor, so the above code took me even longer to put together.. it does the same as the vbscript.


So the workaround is basically : use VBScript to copy your Excel file to SharePoint. Open it with VBScript, read the metadata from a textfile.. and then, using the code above, to set the metadata.


I hope it helps you -- I'm pretty sure it will help me, if I ever need to figure this out again.


Peter