SharePoint Frustrations #1: The undocumented "IncludeTimeValue" CAML attribute
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008I’m planning on doing some posts about frustrating things I have encountered (and still do!) during my SharePoint development efforts. Here’s the first one:
Last year while working on a MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers I stumbled on what I thought was a bug in SharePoint 2007. I had created a custom list that was filled with Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information for the streaming video media that that site contained. I then created a Webpart that used ASP.Net AJAX to continually show the actual EPG information below the video stream.
In order to obtain the EPG items I used a CAML query to query the EPG list. The list was simply a custom list containing amongst others a column of type DateTime that was called "ProgramEnd". As the name suggests it contained the time the program ended. I then used the following code to create a query that was supposed to obtain the currently broadcasted item and all future items.
1: const string EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE = @"
2: <Where>
3: <Geq>
4: <FieldRef Name='ProgramEnd' />
5: <Value Type='DateTime'>{0}</Value>
6: </Geq>
7: </Where>";
8:
9: SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
10: query.Query = String.Format(EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE,
11: SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(DateTime.Now));
12: // ...
To my surprise this query always returned too many items. Further investigation showed that time part of the query seemed to be ignored completely, so it returned the items as if no time was specified! So instead of getting the current item and all future items it returned all items broadcasted for that day.
After wasting a lot of time debugging, using the U2U Caml Query Builder and looking for an answer / solution on the internet I gave up and wrote a quick hack around it, which fortunately wasn’t very difficult. It would just run the query and run the results through some additional code that checked the ProgramEnd DateTime field and filter out the wrong items, like this:
1: SPListItemCollection results = ...; // The results from the query mentioned above
2: // Trim the results to only include the current and future items
3: List<SPListItem> trimmedItems = new List<SPListItem>();
4: foreach (SPListItem result in results)
5: {
6: DateTime programEnd = (DateTime)result["ProgramEnd"];
7: if (programEnd >= DateTime.Now)
8: trimmedItems.Add(result);
9: }
Fortunately this worked just fine and the customer was happy. I was not… 
Today while surfing the Net I stumbled on this entry in the MSDN forums, from which I learned it wasn’t a bug, but that you need to included the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the CAML query, like this:
1: <Where>
2: <Eq>
3: <FieldRef Name='programEnd' />
4: <Value Type='DateTime' IncludeTimeValue='TRUE'>
5: 2008-07-30T12:00:00Z
6: </Value>
7: </Eq>
8: </Where>
If only I had known it was this simple… What bothers me is that this little, but very important attribute seems to be totally undocumented. I couldn’t find any information about it in the WSS / SharePoint SDKs.
Ofcourse once I knew what to look for I found some other blogs and forums mentioning this issue. It turns out the UCSharp blog had already blogged about this way back in October 2007, only a few months after I searched for it. Even Karine Bosch, U2U’s "CAML Girl" and author of the famous U2U CAML Query Builder, says she only recently found out about this. Fortunately she has included support for the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute in her latest version of the U2U Caml Query Builder, which I know a lot of SharePoint developers use to construct and test their CAML queries.
I also noticed that someone called puneetspeed has added some Community Content to the online SharePoint SDK’s SPQuery docs explaining this issue. So hopefully Microsoft will add information about the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the official SDK text in the near future.
