Marco André Silva

For my first SharePoint post I wanted to start by some of the basics related to working with the SharePoint Object Model. For sure there are other posts about this on the net, but I think that my blog should also reflect my SharePoint learning experience, and maybe by doing this I can show different ways accomplish similar things.

So let’s begin. How do you programmatically add Web’s, List’s and Folder’s to SharePoint?

Add a Web

To add a web I used the SPWebs.Webs property that returns a SPWebCollection where you can Add new Web’s. Of course that this means that you should add a web under another web (the parent web).

So to add a web you have to give parameters like the title, description, relative url name, locale id, template to be used, etc. See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spwebcollection.add.aspx .

With this other things that you have to think about are related with the web permissions and navigation nodes (Quick Launch and Top Link Bar’s).

I finish with a sample function that can be used as a starting point.

public SPWeb AddWeb(SPWeb parentWeb, String title, String description, String relativeUrlName, UInt32 localeId, String template, Boolean useUniquePermissions, Boolean addToTopNavigationBar, Boolean addToSitesQuickLaunch)
{
    // Create
    SPWeb newWeb = parentWeb.Webs.Add(relativeUrlName, title, description, localeId, template, useUniquePermissions, false); 

    // Default uses parent navigation
    newWeb.Navigation.UseShared = true; 

    // Test links to add
    SPNavigationNode navigationNodeToAdd = new SPNavigationNode(title, relativeUrlName, false);
    if (addToTopNavigationBar == true)
    { // Add
        parentWeb.Navigation.TopNavigationBar.AddAsLast(navigationNodeToAdd);
    }
    if (addToSitesQuickLaunch == true)
    { // Add to Quick launch sites section
        foreach (SPNavigationNode navigationNode in parentWeb.Navigation.QuickLaunch)
        { // Search sites
            if (navigationNode.Title == "Sites")
            { // Add here
                navigationNode.Children.AddAsLast(navigationNodeToAdd);
                // Stop searching
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    return newWeb;
}

By the way, the last part to add the navigation node to the Quick Launch Sites section is just an example that may not work if you are using sites in languages other than English.