Version 5.4 of SQList is a minor update from ver. 5.x.x, you can, therefore, upgrade for free if you have a licensed version 5.x. There are no breaking changes in this update.
See below a summary of the changes.
Added feature to keep user-defined columns
SQList mirrors the structure of a SQL table with the structure of its corresponding SharePoint lists. This means that when a new column is added to the list it gets added to the table. Likewise, when a column is removed from the list, it gets removed from the table.
Although we recommend not to alter the structure of the tables generated by SQList in any way, there are exceptional cases when you may need to add some columns to the table. This has become particularly true with temporal tables introduced with SQL Server 2016, which require two special columns to be added to the table.
You can read more about temporal tables here:
Although you cannot enable temporal tables via the SQList Manager interface, you can enable them directly in SQL Server . This article(1) describes the steps to enable system versioning on tables create by SQList:
There is a new global setting that can be used to instruct SQList not to drop certain columns for the SQL tables, when it synchronises their structure with their corresponding SharePoint list. Although this setting has been added mainly to handle the extra column required by SQL Server system versioning, it can be used for any columns you may want to add to the tables.
This new setting can be found in the "Settings" tab in SQList Manager; note that it is a global setting and therefore will affect all replications. By default, SQList will keep these columns:
- SysStartTime
- SysEndTime
- SysPrimaryKey
(1) These columns are used in the article mentioned above
Added setting to manage throttling in SharePoint Online
We introduced an additional configuration setting as part of the site definition, to manage throttling in SharePoint Online.
In the site definition details, there is a new setting named "Throttling control delays"; you can use this setting to define the length (in milliseconds) that SQList waits between requests to that particular site.
Note that while this setting is particularly aimed to SharePoint Online sites, it can be useful for an on-prem SharePoint farm as well, to reduce the amount of pressure put on the SharePoint WFEs.
For more information about throttling, please refer to this article:
Added list item's version columns as part of standard columns
As part of the standard columns, SQList now exports the the following columns that contain the list item's version numbers:
- owshiddenversion
- _UIVersion
- _UIVersionString
Improvements and fixes:
- Improved connection to SharePoint web services: we have made several improvements to the way SQList connects to the SharePoint web services, which should result in less connections and authentications, to reduce the traffic to the SharePoint server itself and to the domain controller (where applicable);
- Fixed SyncStatus table key: we fixed a problem that was causing unnecessary re-synchronisations when a replication was configured not to add the table prefix to the SQL table;
- Added debug logging option to UI: we have added an option in SQList manager to enable Debug logging; previously this mode could only be enabled in the app.config file;
- Reset change token when table is created: dropping a SQList table from the database will force a full re-synchronisation; previously you also had to reset the change token.