Can you use a Sharepoint Trigger to export an uploaded Excel File to a Network Drive as CSV?

Question

I have a business requirement to process files uploaded by regional businesses for import to another system. It's envisaged that users will use SharePoint 2007 (soon to be SharePoint 2013), the event will trigger an export to CSV and the process will then run against those files.

1. Is this possible in either SharePoint versions?

2. Would that be an app, or standalone service I would want to create and schedule?

Does anyone have a more elegant solution? Essentially the CSV export is feeding in to a program that allows a user to visually validate and press a button to push to the other system after tweaking.

Answer 1

With custom code, you could create an event receiver on the list where CSV file lives that will run some code whenever the CSV file is updated. Here's a starter:

http://elczara.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/sharepoint-2010-event-receiver/

Make it a farm solution (sandbox solutions can't write to the filesystem directly), and you'll probably want to look up RunWithElevatedPrivileges, since the user doing the uploading may not have permission to write to the file system.

Steve's suggestion of rethinking the end-to-end solution is a good one, although I'm not sure how you can trigger the other system to "do its business".

Answer 2

Yes, it is possible, both with the 2007 version and the 2013.

Depending on your deployment scenario, you can:

1. create a custom timer job that will execute your job.
2. Create a custom site Workflow, with a loop and a delay, that will do the job.

The 1st is easier to build and maintain, but has less perspectives if you need to apply custom process.

But if you can control the application that consumes the feed, why don't you consume SharePoint directly? From the 2010 version, you can very easily get data using the listdata.svc web service. With older versions, you can still get data using a simple web service.