Comments on: Easy Check If An SPWeb/SPList Exist

By: Easy Check If An SPWeb/SPList Exist | Hexanes!

Easy Check If An SPWeb/SPList Exist | Hexanes! — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:10:21 +0000

[...] great post, one of those finer details of SharePoint API development that I use a lot as well: Easy Check If An SPWeb/SPList Exist By David Petersen, January 20, 2010 2:57 [...]

By: David Petersen

David Petersen — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:15:22 +0000

Thank you everyone for commenting on this post. I want to clarify a few things:

These methods are only available if you reference System.Linq which is in .NET Framework 3.5. (Target framework: .NET Framework 3.5 from the Application, Project Properties).
As long as you are targeting .NET Framework 3.5 in your project, you can use these methods on WSS 3.0 based projects.
The way the lambda works is that is will iterate through the list until it finds a match or reaches the end. This is not the most efficient way but with WSS 3.0, it is the cleanest way (IMHO) outside of trapping an error in a TryCatch block.
The TryGetList() method is only available in SharePoint 2010.

Keep the comments coming. I learn something new everyday!

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 13 May 2011 09:51:24 +0000

These methods are not very efficient if there are a large number of lists/webs, because all of them are iterated.

To check if a list exists, better use the TryGetList() approach:

return web.Lists.TryGetList(listName) != null

By: Sarika

Sarika — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:58:39 +0000

Thanks a lot

By: sameer

sameer — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:08:16 +0000

Nice blog! Thanks for sharing!

By: Joen Zhang

Joen Zhang — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 08:27:07 +0000

We can check if webName is existing SPWebCollection.Names.
So i often use a extension method for SPWebCollection:
public static class SPWebCollectionExtension
{
public static Boolean Contains(this SPWebCollection webCollection, String webName)
{
if (webCollection == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(“webCollection”);
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(webName)) throw new ArgumentException(“webName”);
return Array.Exists(webCollection.Names, s => s.Equals(webName, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase));
}
}