Making Bulk Changes

If you’ve ever had to administer a SharePoint site before, you’ve probably been presented with the “ownership change” problem. It’s not uncommon in organizations of all sizes to have an employee leave. The problem is what to do with things like SharePoint lists or tasks assigned to them. An obvious solution is to write a program to make the changes for you.

We’ll use the task application from the previous chapter as a starting point and add some functionality to implement a search-and-replace capability. The basic approach is to build a search screen to find all items assigned to a specific user and then add code behind a button to change the owner to a different user. Figure 4-4 shows what the basic app looks like.