Creating a SharePoint 2010 page via the client object model - sharepoint-2010

Question

I am attempting to create pages in a Sharepoint 2010 pages library via the client object model but I cannot find any examples on how to do it. I have tried two approaches:
The first is to treat the Pages library as a list and try to add a list item.
static void createPage(Web w, ClientContext ctx)
{
List pages = w.Lists.GetByTitle("Pages");
//ListItem page = pages.GetItemById(0);
ListItemCreationInformation lici = new ListItemCreationInformation();
ListItem li = pages.AddItem(lici);
li["Title"] = "hello";
li.Update();
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
As expected, this failed with the error message:
To add an item to a document library, use SPFileCollection.Add()
The next approach I tried was to add it as a file. The problem is that the FileCreationInformation object is expecting a byte array and I am not sure what to pass to it.
static void createPage(Web w, ClientContext ctx)
{
List pages = w.Lists.GetByTitle("Pages");
FileCreationInformation file = new FileCreationInformation();
file.Url = "testpage.aspx";
file.Content = new byte[0];
file.Overwrite = true;
ctx.Load(pages.RootFolder.Files.Add(file));
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
The piece of code above will add an item in the Pages library but opening the file brings up a blank page which I cannot edit. From reading various topics, I suspect that it may only be possible to add pages via server side code. Any thoughts?
Thanks

Answer 1

The problem is that the
FileCreationInformation object is
expecting a byte array and I am not
sure what to pass to it.
You could you whatever method you want to get the page contents into a string (read it from a file, create it using a StringBuilder, etc) and then convert the string to a byte array using
System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes()

Answer 2

First of all, Publishing API is not supported via Client Side Object Model (CSOM) in SharePoint 2010. But you could consider the following approach that demonstrates how to create a publishing page using SharePoint 2010 CSOM.
How to create a publishing page using SharePoint 2010 CSOM
public static void CreatePublishingPage(ClientContext ctx, string listTitle, string pageName, string pageContent)
{
const string publishingPageTemplate = "<%# Page Inherits=\"Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.TemplateRedirectionPage,Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing,Version=14.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c\" %> <%# Reference VirtualPath=\"~TemplatePageUrl\" %> <%# Reference VirtualPath=\"~masterurl/custom.master\" %>";
var pagesList = ctx.Web.Lists.GetByTitle(listTitle);
var fileInfo = new FileCreationInformation
{
Url = pageName,
Content = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(publishingPageTemplate),
Overwrite = true
};
var pageFile = pagesList.RootFolder.Files.Add(fileInfo);
var pageItem = pageFile.ListItemAllFields;
if (!ctx.Site.IsPropertyAvailable("ServerRelativeUrl"))
{
ctx.Load(ctx.Site);
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
pageItem["PublishingPageLayout"] = string.Format("{0}_catalogs/masterpage/ArticleLeft.aspx, ArticleLeft",ctx.Site.ServerRelativeUrl);
pageItem["PublishingPageContent"] = pageContent;
pageItem.Update();
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
Usage
using (var ctx = new ClientContext(url))
{
ctx.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username", "password", "domain");
CreatePublishingPage(ctx, "Pages", "Greetings.aspx", "Welcome to SharePoint!");
}