Riding the CAML

As a developer, if you want to customize MOSS to any extent, you will need to familiarize yourself with CAML, or Collaborative Application Markup Language. On the current project that I am working on, we needed to create a page in Sharepoint that would display four images across the page to display the product images. Thinking we were going to need to create a custom page for this content, we started the long journey of research that seems to come with a MOSS project. Our researching led us to modifying pages using CAML.

The language itself is not hard to understand. Basically, it allows you to make universal changes to a site. Microsoft uses CAML extensively in MOSS. Some vital links that any developer needs when delving into the black abyss of CAML are included below, the first link is an introduction and the second displays some examples of using CAML to do various things in MOSS.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/
spsdk11/CAML_Schema/spxmlconCAML.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/
spsdk11/CAML_Schema/spxmlconhowto.asp

Another important aspect of CAML and MOSS is knowing where to look for it. This link will show you where CAML files are located.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/
spsdk11/CAML_Schema/spxmlconCAMLlocation.asp

So how did our project work out? We ended up not needing to make a custom page, we found a Web part that would accomplish what we needed and then we extended it to get the final touches.

Although we did not use CAML in this part of the project I am sure we will be coming across it again since it is such an integrated part of MOSS.