Copy sharepoint list item using powershell script

Few days ago i wrote about the problem that How an anonymous user could start a workflow in sharepoint. The solution was to create and schedule a powershell script to update the list items in a given Sharepoint list using a real named account. So the workflow can be started in the name of this user. The WorkFlow is triggered by a modification.

But in that case we can have a problem if we don’t check wether if the item was already updated or not. And what if we don’t want anonymous users to have a look at each others items in the given list? (okay, okay i know let’s do an empty view and such workaround solution…) So a simple solution could be to copy these list items to another list.

As the copy is made by using a named account you can have a WorkFlow triggered by new item creation at the destionation list. So every workflow runs only once. You do not need to check anything during the workflow…

So here you are a sample code to copy list item from a given list to another one:

[System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
$site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://moss")
$web = $site.AllWebs | where { $_.name -eq "TestSite"}
$lista =$web.Lists["CopyFromList"]
$listb =$web.Lists["CopyToList"]
$items = $lista.items
foreach ($item in $items) {
write-host -foregroundcolor yellow $item["Title"]
$newitem= $listb.items.Add()
$newitem["Title"] = $item["Title"]
$newitem["AnotherField"] = $item["AnotherField"]
$newitem.update()
start-sleep 1
$item.Delete()
}
$web.dispose
$site.dispose
start-sleep 10

Of course both lists have to have the same structure or at least the CopyToList has to have the fields of the CopyFromList.
This script also has to be scheduled at the Sharepoint server locally.

You can schedule this script as well. Have fun!