Introducing SPTools: A GUI for Performing Batch Tasks on SharePoint Lists
About a year ago I started writing JavaScript functions to perform batch tasks on SharePoint lists using SPServices. I did this because SharePoint didn’t offer the functionality I needed out of the box, and I’m limited to SharePoint Designer for all development at my workplace. After writing several of these functions for one-off projects (mostly site maintenance and cleanup tasks dealing with hundreds of items at a time), I realized that there might be a benefit to creating an easy-to-use toolset for the most common tasks I was performing.
With that goal in mind, I started reworking my code to make it more reusable. Instead of hard-coding everything, I wanted to create a GUI that would let me specify things like which list to act upon and what items to manipulate. I also thought this would be a great project to get my feet wet with Twitter Bootstrap.
The end result is SPTools:

The tools are somewhat limited in capability at this point; I’ve only developed what I’ve needed to use so far. Over time I plan on expanding the options for the existing tools and adding new tools based on user feedback. Some of the current highlights include:
- Approve list items that require content approval
- Duplicate list items into another list and remap columns to new column names if desired
- Check in files
- Start a workflow for list/library items
- Get a random item from a list/library and display a link to it on the page (I used this recently to randomly select winners from a crossword puzzle contest)
To try it out, download the zip file from GitHub, unzip the files, then upload them into any SharePoint document library. Open the index.html
file to get started (the readme has some basic instructions on using SPTools).

SPTools is still in a very “alpha” state, but I’ve been sitting on this for months and didn’t want to wait any longer to release it to the public. I’d really like for people familiar with writing their own SPServices functions to test this out and provide feedback, submit patches, suggest new tools, or contribute in any way you can. It’s hosted on GitHub (sorry CodePlex users), so you can submit issues or pull requests if you have an account. Otherwise feel free to leave your feedback in the comments below!
Comments
console.log()
without the F12 developer tools opened. I included a function in SPTools that *should* prevent those kinds of errors, because my script writes information to the browser console for debugging. I've successfully tested this in IE9 running in IE7 compatibility mode with and without the dev tools opened. What browser/version are you using? Can you try opening the F12 developer tools and running the script again, or using Chrome or Firefox with Firebug? I'm interested to see if Nintex workflows can be started via the web services. Let me know if you get it working! This is good feedback!Comments are closed