Improvement in spo listitem add

[appieschot]

Encountered while building #3013. When passing empty values in spo listitem add (null values or empty strings) the response when adding an item is Error: Item does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.

I suggest we add logic to exclude empty values before adding an item to prevent this (for a me a weird error); that way writing scripts becomes easier (sometimes you want to create a bunch of new items when migrating something ;-)). We should implement this in private mapRequestBody(options: Options).

@pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers do you feel the same?

[waldekmastykarz]

Could you share some more information how to reproduce this? Is the matching field in the list required or not? I wonder if there are cases where you might want us to pass empty values through and if this changes wouldn't lead to a breaking behavior.

[appieschot]

What happens now is that if I have an array with objects that has the following output ;

Title       : Finished task
Bucket      : New Bucket
Progress    : In progress
Priority    :
Description :
StartDate   : 04/02/2022 10:00:00
DueDate     : 05/02/2022 10:00:00
Checklist   :
AssignedTo  : [{'Key':'i:0#.f|membership|[email protected]'},{'Key':'i:0#.f|membership|[email protected]'}]

Title       : Test task
Bucket      : New Bucket
Progress    : Completed
Priority    :
Description :
StartDate   :
DueDate     :
Checklist   :
AssignedTo  :

And would run the a foreach on that object exuecting this:

m365 spo listitem add --webUrl $newPlanSiteUrl --listTitle $plan.title --Title $migrationTask.Title --Bucket $migrationTask.Bucket --Progress $migrationTask.Progress --Start_x0020_date $migrationTask.StartDate --Due_x0020_date $migrationTask.DueDate --Assigned_x0020_to $migrationTask.AssignedTo

The result would be:

Processing (1/2)
Processing (2/2)
Error: Item does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.

Removing the fields that are empty from adding will fix the issue and the item will be created. None of the columns specified are currently marked as required. It seems to be happening with the datetime fields; the text fields and choice fields can handle an empty value.

[appieschot]

Another unforeseen consequence of current implementation is if you would specify --Title twice in the add the value of your title twice in the list item in SharePoint.

[waldekmastykarz]

As long as we don't use trim before we detect values, I can't think of any edge case for creating items with empty values that would prevent us from dropping them from the payload.