SPTD (no its not a venereal disease, but can cause hives)

Test Data Load Tool is a nifty little utility for creating data in your WSS or SharePoint site. You can download the tool at CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/sptdatapop.

The tool provides a repeatable way to create test data for your SharePoint sites. It is extremely cool and even with the warts it is worth the time to sit and learn it. If you are a tester for SharePoint solutions you need to add this one to your bag of tricks. If you are a developer you will appreciate the base framework and potential.

The tool comes in two flavors (WSSDW.exe) and (MOSSDW.exe). They are in separate download packages so if you want to load data for things like SSO, publishing portals, audiences (SharePoint features) you will need to get both downloads. The tools are fairly easy to grasp, just take some time and go through the help files and samples.

That said the tools are buggy. Here are some things I learned the hard way.

1. The Delete option works about half the time... I finally quite using it and went another route. I'm sure the code is working as intended, but when you say delete you expect everything to go. Perhaps a -force option is needed with the delete.



2. ModifyExisting depends on "ModifyOne" interface being implemented, if the interface is not implemented no updates are made. It is extremely frustrating when you want to do something simple (ex. change the title of a web) and discover that the Webs class does not do anything in ModifyOne.



3. Pages have to be checked out to modify them (this may make you go Duh, but I was hoping to not have to worry about things like checkin/checkout/publish since it is a test tool). I ended up having 3 statements per page (one with OpenorCreate, one with checkout, one with publish).



4. Don't expect your script to work the first (or second, or third) time. Plan on having plenty of time to work through issues as you learn about the subtle nuances of the tool. It took me a good 2 days to get the kinks worked out of my script, but once I had it done I could bounce from environment to environment and setup a site that was test worthy (Seinfeld reference).


5. Depending on the amount / type of work your script needs to do it can take a while to run the script. I uploaded about 200 images and documents. The first run took about 30 minutes to do the upload, but every run after that was < 1 minute.