Programmatically retrieve the list of all Delve boards

When building custom solutions on top of the Office Graph you might want to include the list of relevant boards. Find out how to programmatically retrieve the list of all Office Delve boards.

Boards in Office Delve

Recently Microsoft started releasing boards in Office Delve as a part of the First Release. Boards are a new way to organize content in Delve. More information about what boards in Office Delve are and how you can use them can be found in the official announcement which also includes a short video demonstrating the feature: http://blogs.office.com/2015/01/07/introducing-boards-office-delve-new-way-organize-share-work/.

Delve boards in custom solutions

When building custom solutions on top of the Office Graph you might be interested in getting a list of all boards and incorporating them in your application. Even though the Office Graph API currently available is in preview, it allows us to retrieve a list of all Office Delve boards.

To retrieve a list of all boards you need to execute the following Search REST API request:

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?QueryText='Path:TAG://PUBLIC/?NAME=*'&Properties='IncludeExternalContent:true'&SelectProperties='DocId,Title,Path'&RankingModelId='0c77ded8-c3ef-466d-929d-905670ea1d72'&ClientType='WaldekDemoApp'

The key piece is the keyword query which is set to Path:TAG://PUBLIC/?NAME=*. The string following the Path Managed Property is the string prepending the name of every Delve board and the asterisk at the end specifies that we would simply like to get all items from the search index starting with the board identifier string (all boards). For this query to work we also need to pass the IncludeExternalContent:true property. Without it the query will return no results.

For each board we retrieve its ID (DocId), display name (Title) and Path. The ID is required if you want to retrieve all documents that belong to the particular board and which I will discuss in more detail in my next blog post.

Issuing the request shown above will give you the list of all boards currently existing in Office Delve - even if they don’t contain any documents.

Summary

When building custom solutions on top of the Office Graph you might want to include the list of relevant boards. By issuing a specific SharePoint 2013 Search query you can retrieve the list of all available boards in Office Delve for use in your application.