Replacing old URLs with new in a Document Library list view

Question

I have a SharePoint 2013 on-premises site. I've been asked to import a Document Library from an old SP2010 site. The Document Library to be imported has standard metadata (Modified by and Modified date) and I need to retain this.

The person who created this Library also added a Comments column, and a Hyperlink column. The hyperlink column points to a different folder/file - a scanned pdf version of the listed Word document.

While the other metadata must be preserved after the import, the Hyperlink column needs to be updated to point at the new site rather than the old site.

E.g., an entry for a document might read: Name__________________Comments_______Hyperlink__________Modified

BusinessPlan2016.docx Sample comment http://oldsite/policies/pdfversion/plan2016.pdf

and I need to update this so that the URL now reads http://newsite/policies/pdfversion/plan2016.pdf

Is there an easy way to do this globally? The Doc Library contains several subfolders, each with their own documents, so doing this manually will take too long.

I'm an IT admin with limited SharePoint 2013 experience thus far.

Answer 1

Basically you need to do a substring replacement in one particular field of each item in the document library. I would do this with PowerShell:

$web = Get-SPWeb "<Web_URL>"
$list = $web.Lists["<Library_name>"]
$fieldname = "<Field_name>"
$list.Items | % { $_[$fieldName] = $_[$fieldName] -replace "<old_substring>", "<new_substring>" ; $_.Update() }