Sunday 18 January 2015

Get all documents from an Office 365 Group with REST

In my previous post, we saw how you can get a list of all the groups in your Office 365 portal with the REST API. Now, if you are building a solution on top of the Office 365 platform and want a list of all the documents in a particular Office 365 Group, you can get them using the REST API.

As discussed in my previous post, each group is underpinned by a separate site collection in SharePoint Online. When you upload a document to a group, it gets uploaded in the "Documents" library of the root web of that site collection. So you can use the REST API to get all sorts of information about the group including the list of documents. 

Here is a test group called "Technical Team" I have created in Office 365 for the purpose of this post. I have also uploaded 2 documents to it:



In order to get the list of documents in the group, we need to make a REST call to the SharePoint Search REST API:

_api/search/query?querytext='SiteTitle:"Technical Team" AND ContentTypeId:0x0101007DB6FD427B6228409ED888DF766B27C9'&selectproperties='Title,Path,SiteTitle'

The ContentTypeId is the id of the content type which is associated to the document when a document is uploaded to an Office 365 group.

Here is the complete code. I have used JavaScript and the jQuery.ajax function to make calls to the SharePoint REST API. But you can use a variety of other options like the JSOM, CSOM or even the Office 365 APIs. Since all the groups are by default open to users in the tenant, there should not be major challenges to authentication around this. I haven't tested the code for these APIs myself. 


And the logs in my Dev tools console:



Thanks for reading!

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