SPSite

Getting levels of the SharePoint Heirarchy and their Exceptions

Andy Burns, , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Something that I have to do time and again is get some element of SharePoint’s heirarchy, such as a site collection, site, list or item. This is pretty typical – that’s why we all use USING to ensure proper disposal of SPSites and SPWebs, right? But what happens if the thing you’re after isn’t there? What exception get’s thrown? Well, this should be pretty clear:

try
{
    //FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteGuid))
    {
        //FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
        using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(webGuid))
        {
            //SPException if doesn't exist
            SPList list = web.Lists[listGuid];

            //ArgumentException if doesn't exist
            SPListItem item = list.GetItemByUniqueId(itemGuid);
        }
    }
}
catch (System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileEx2)
{
    // Site or Site Collection Not Found
}
catch (SPException spEx2)
{
    // List not found
}
catch (ArgumentException argEx2)
{
    // Item not found
}

Hopefully that might prove useful to someone – and a good reminder for me.

Getting levels of the SharePoint Heirarchy and their Exceptions

Getting Absolute URLs in SharePoint

Andy Burns, , 3 Comments

This is a bit of a reminder for myself, but quite a lot of the URLs you deal with in SharePoint development are relative – that is, something like an SPList.DefaultViewURL might be:

/sites/web/lists/list/allitems.aspx

That’s fine … but sometimes you need a full absolute URL. For example, you might be sending out an email with a hyperlink in it – a relative URL ain’t going to cut it.

Fortunately, there is a very useful function – SPSite.MakeFullUrl() :

Returns the full URL for the specified server-relative URL.

That’s great – but it raises some questions. What about Alternate Access Maps? What URL would be returned? Well, predictably, the URL used in the SPSite Constructor in the first place. Mostly, they either accept a URL (which defines a zone), or they accept a GUID and an SPUrlZone value. There is a constructor that just accepts a GUID – which will then use the default zone. Similarly, the constructor accepting a GUID and SPUserToken also uses the Default Zone.

(If you open it up in reflector, you can see it just calling a private constructor passing the SPUrlZone.Default value).

Getting Absolute URLs in SharePoint

How to get an SPWeb object from a URL

Andy Burns, , , 5 Comments

One of the problems with SharePoint is that it’s very difficult to figure out what site is specified by a URL. After all, the URL to a particular page contains:

  • the Server
  • possibly (but not necessarily) a managed path and site collection
  • possibly (but not necessarily) a site
  • possibly (but not necessarily) a folder (such as ‘/lists/’)
  • possibly (but not necessarily) a list/library name
  • possibly (but not necessarily) a folder in a Library
  • the item itself.

Suffice to say, with all those optional bits, decomposing a URL to find the site is really hard. There is, however, a slightly obscure way of find this. You can create a site collection (SPSite) with a full URL, and then simply call OpenWeb() without any parameters to return you the site (SPWeb):

string path = "http://example/examplesite/_layouts/settings.aspx";
try
{
using (SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite(path))
{
using (SPWeb site = siteCollection.OpenWeb())
//Do something with the site
}
}
}

I found this when looking at the MSDN docs for SPSite.OpenWeb(). Check out the examples in there.

It’s a little weird that the SPSite object remembers information about how it was opened like that. But it is useful to know.

How to get an SPWeb object from a URL