If you’ve been developing client side applications or functionality using SPServices and the SOAP Web Services, sooner or later you’ll want to move to REST instead. This session takes the patterns shown in my article series on ITUnity and my blog and makes it real with real-world examples. There are some things you can do now to prepare for this eventuality, whether it’s part of an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 or simply because you’ve got “legacy” code that uses SOAP instead of REST. We’ll go through the decision points, specific code examples, and better practices.

3. series on
ITUnity my blog

4. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP#History, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

5. Deprecated
Deprecated
Endpoint
/_vti_bin/listdata.svc
/_api
Deprecated
TBD, but unified
None
SOAP REST

6. Source: https://spservices.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=$().SPServices
SOAP

8. SOAP

9. SOAP
REST

10. SOAPREST

11. SOAP Option
(SPServices synonym)
REST Comments
ViewFields
(CAMLViewFields)
$select Choose the columns you would like to retrieve. With both SOAP and REST we get
some data we don’t explicitly request, but by specifying only the columns we need
we can reduce the payload sizes.
Query
(CAMLQuery)
$filter,
$orderby
Specify which items in the list we would like to return and how we would like them
sorted.
RowLimit
(CAMLRowLimit)
$limit Say how many items matching the Query we would like to receive. In SOAP we can
specify 0 to get all matching items; in REST we can omit the parameter to get all the
matching items. Otherwise, we can specify any integer as the limit.
ViewName
(CAMLViewName)
NA ViewName lets you choose the view you would like to get in the response. There’s
no REST equivalent here. I’ve always discouraged using this option in SOAP because
it’s too easy to change the view settings and cause unintended consequences.
QueryOptions
(CAMLQueryOptions)
NA In SOAP, this lets us specify some options that change how the data is returned to
us. For example, we can ask for all of the attachment URLs rather than just a
Boolean which tells us that there are attachments.
NA $expand This option in REST has no direct equivalent in SOAP. $expand allows us to indicate
that we would like the values for a relationship - rather than just the indices - using
a projection. This is important with Lookup columns and Person or Group columns.

13. JSON
SPGetListItemsJson
XML
GetListItems

14. JSON
REST

15. Details: https://www.getpostman.com/

16. We’ll look at live examples showing the different
ways we can request data, along with conversion
approaches.

17. SharePoint 2013 – CRUD on List Items Using REST
Services & jQuery
Get started with the SharePoint 2013 REST service
Working with lists and list items with REST
Use OData query operations in SharePoint REST
requests
OData.org

18. Email marc.anderson@sympraxisconsulting.com
Twitter @sympmarc
Blog http://sympmarc.com
SPServices http://spservices.codeplex.com
SPXSLT http://spxslt.codeplex.com
Books http://sympmarc.com/books
The Middle Tier Manifesto http://bit.ly/middletier