Of course, you could copy/paste a range of Excel cells into a datasheet view.

Hope that helps.

Blessings,
Jim Bob

Thanks, This response give me confidence about Form Action Workflow solution. I also want to use web service to manipulate list, but i can only use javascript because IT restrict us to run server code like apsx code. Unfortunately my data is more than 20,000, so i still looking some batch or bulk solution. could you give me some suggestion ? I’m thinking using excel file or xml and directly insert itemlist to list folder in webservice. Do you think is this workable?

Regards,
Mia

I don’t see a problem with updating multiple items in a loop. Workflows do have a bit of timing overhead, but I’ve done it lots of times.

For large numbers of updates, I’ve used SPServices (both synchronously and asynchronously) and haven’t noticed any performance issues.

I recently ran through almost 1000 active directory records via a web service; retrieved organization upline information for each user through recursive calls to that web service, then retrieved organizational downline information for each manager through recursive calls; pulled user profile information from SharePoint (also via a web service), compared each item with existing records in another SP list and wrote out the ones that were missing or needed to be updated. All told, there were probably 5 or 6 thousand web service calls, with just under 700 writes to SharePoint. It took about 10 minutes to run, but no errors, hangs, or corruptions.

Hope that helps.

Blessings,
Jim Bob

Thanks for sharing, i’m trying to use Form Action Workflow for multiple items update. But i wonder if it cause system resource problem like connection full or anything else when i run the form action workflow in javascript within a loop ???

That’s great! I appreciate the effort you’re taking to study these things. We’ll all learn from the dialogue! Will check out Mark’s and Jason’s posts.

Blessings,
Jim Bob

Jason also had a different way to crack the nut in:
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/04/21/4-clicks-or-1-using-jquery-to-start-a-sharepoint-workflow/

As you can tell, I am re-reading your complete series!
Greg

Blessings,
Jim Bob

public string GenFireWorkflowStart(string listName, string itemID, string workflowId, string workflowParams)
{
return base.GenFireServerEvent(”__workflowStart={” + listName + “,” + itemID + “,” + workflowId + “,” + workflowParams + “};__redirectSource;__redirectToList={listName};”);
}

maybe the first param can be the listurl like we use when defining lookups
the second parameter is the itemId, so New and a number are valid values
the third parameter is the workflow instance id
and the fourth, well now I understand why its an * delimited list (not so odd now) [comma was taken]