With the advent of the Web Service Task in SQL2005 Integration services I had high hopes that integration of Sharepoint Lists (via the Sharepoint Web Services) would be easy to achieve, but it seems I was wrong.

Whilst the Web Service Task happily gets simple definitions of lists, when it comes to handling Web services with complex XML type parameters then it just gives up and gives an error.

An example of a Sharepoint Web Service it cant cope with is the GetListItems Method, amongst one of it's parameters it takes viewFields complex type and the Web Service Task just gives up.

viewFields   A ViewFields element that specifies which fields to return in the query and in what order, and that can be assigned to a System.Xml.XmlNode object, as in the following example:

<ViewFields>
   <FieldRef Name="ID" />
   <FieldRef Name="Title" />
</ViewFields>
 
and the WSDL definition for this is
 
-- <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="viewFields">
- <s:complexType mixed="true">
- <s:sequence>
  <s:any /> 
  </s:sequence>
  </s:complexType>
  </s:element>
 
 
There seems to be very few examples of people who have tried this although the following articles from rdoherty's WebLog and Klaus Salchner were helpfull.
 
Can anyone assist in suggestions as to how to overcome this ?