How to download certain columns from an item?

Question

I would like to download the metadata for an item. I don't want all the columns because SharePoint adds bunch of them, e.g. date, name, etc. that I don't need. I just want to download the columns for an item's content type.

For example, my document.doc has content type G2 associated with it (about 12 custom columns). I just want the info from these columns or fields.

Answer 1

You could write a a bunch of CAML queries and feed those to an SPSiteDataQuery. To get only the fields needed, User code to get to the SPContentType's Fields, then for each Contenttype execute the SPSiteDataQuery, including the fields in the content type in the query's ViewFields:

pseudo code

• define the list of contenttype id's that should be included in a variable
• define a variable that holds field id's of fields to be excluded from a query
• get the list of content types (SPSite.RootWeb.ContentTypes)
• loop through those content types
• if current content type in loop does not exist in list of content types to be queried (as defined in variable), continue
• if content type should be included, get it's fields
• build an SPSiteDataQuery, adding the current SPContentType's fields to the query's ViewFields
• execute the query (excluding any field as defined in exclusion variable)
• export the resulting DataTable to an Xml File (or any other format)

Answer 2

You can create a view of the data to show you the desired metadata then export that to Excel. You'll end up with 1 extra column, the file location, but that's easy enough to remove.