OMG - Have I been blind all this while?

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Been wanting to post this for sometime, just didn’t have the time to do it.

Ever looked closely at formulae in calculated fields?

I never realized how similar formulae in calculated fields were to CAML. It’s almost a 1:1 translation.

For example look at this

Calculated Field:

=AND(Category="Books",OR([Importance]="Critical",[Importance]="Urgent"))

CAML:

<And>

<Eq>

            <FieldRef Name=”Category”/>

            <Value Type=”Text”>Books></Value>

</Eq>

<Or>

            <Eq>

                        <FieldRef Name=”Importance”/>

                        <Value Type=”Text”/>Critical</Value

            </Eq>

            <Eq>

                        <FieldRef Name=”Importance”/>

                        <Value Type=”Text”/>Urgent</Value

            </Eq>

</Or>   

</And>

Both those are virtually the same, which leads me to assume that calculated fields are converted to CAML internally; but that’s not the important bit. The important bit is, naturally there should be something in the API similar to a parser that would convert ‘Calculated field’ formulae to CAML. In fact it might be much more usable than something I wrote.

I’m hunting for this now. Let me know if any of you find it.