Retrieving High Priority Tasks with SharePoint’s Query REST API

This will be a quick post. Recently, when I wanted to make a REST call to retrieve all of the high priority tasks from a set of task lists, I figured it would be no big deal. I’d just add something into the querytext and be done with it. Unfortunately, syntax is always a cruel bedfellow.

I tried all sorts of things, like:

PriorityOWSCHCS:(1) High
PriorityOWSCHCS=(1) High
PriorityOWSCHCS='(1) High'
Priority:'(1) High'

etc.
Someone like Mikael Svenson (@mikaelsvenson) – search guru that he is – would just look at this and tell me immediately what to do, but I try not to bug him unless it’s something complicated. Oddly, I couldn’t find a single example out there of someone doing this. It would seem to be a common request: show me all of the high priority tasks in the Site Collection so that I can focus on them.

In this case, we’re showing those tasks on a fullcalendar on the home page of a parent site which has many subsites, each for a project. Fullcalendar is an excellent, full-featured JavaScript calendar widget that you can pretty easily add into a SharePoint page. You just have to feed it data in a format it can understand. So we want to retrieve all of those project tasks using the search API and massage them into the fullcalendar format.

The filtering solution turned out to be too easy:

Priority:1

Here’s the full code that I came up with for this part of my KnockoutJS view model:

// Only get tasks with Priority='(1) High'
var projectTasks = [];
$.ajax({
  url: _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl + "/_api/search/query?" +
    "querytext=%27ContentTypeId:0x01080023AEF73C31A00C4C87FD5DB6FD82F6EE* Priority:1%27" +
    "&selectproperties=%27Title,StartDateOWSDATE,DueDateOWSDATE,Path,Body,PriorityOWSCHCS%27",
  type: "GET",
  headers: {
    "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
  },
  success: function(data) {

    $.each(data.d.query.PrimaryQueryResult.RelevantResults.Table.Rows.results, function(index, item) {

      var searchResult = [];

      // Normalize the fields
      $.each(this.Cells.results, function(i, prop) {
        searchResult[prop.Key] = prop.Value; // { Value: prop.Value, ValueType: prop.ValueType };
      });

      projectTasks.push({
        calendar: "Project Tasks",
        color: "rgb(100,150,148)",
        title: searchResult.Title,
        path: searchResult.Path,
        eventDate: $.fullCalendar.moment(searchResult.StartDateOWSDATE),
        endDate: $.fullCalendar.moment(searchResult.DueDateOWSDATE)
      });
    });
  },
  error: function(error) {
    alert(JSON.stringify(error));
  }
});

If nothing else, the next time I need to do this, I’ll hit something when I search!