Hardik Shah [Guru]'s official Blog world: SharePoint 2007: Accessing a SharePoint List programmatically

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 offers the best portal, collaboration and content management for an enterprise. Teams using a SharePoint portal can collaborate using Document libraries, lists, picture libraries, discussion boards, surveys, etc. Amongst those I mentioned, document libraries are the most used allowing a team to share documents(of Office 2003/07) and stay synchronized with the latest one allowing real-time collaboration. These lists and libraries can be accessed programmatically in C# using the SharePoint Object Model(SOM). Though SOM can also be used to access different entities like Workflows, Site Features, etc; in this post I'll be focusing on accessing lists/libraries using SOM.

Following will give you a quick gist of how we can access a SharePoint list present in a SharePoint site based on the hierarchy.

Hierarchy	Class
• SharePoint Site Collection (i.e. top-level or parent site)	SPSite
• SharePoint Site (i.e. target or sub-site)	SPWeb
• SharePoint List under the target site	SPList
• List Items in the List	SPListItem

In my following example, I’m trying to access images in a Picture Library named ‘PictureLibrary1’ present at the URL http://ram2003svr:8080/PictureLibrary1. The List Items existing in the ‘PictureLIbrary1’ are ‘Name’, ‘Title’. I have used an ASP.Net website for this example, so make sure you have the following three libraries added as a reference to your project.

• Microsoft.SharePoint
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Security
• Microsoft.SharePoint.intl

You can copy the DLL’s from your GAC using this link Here.

CODE Snippet:

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
 
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
 
public partial class Image_Library_Webpart_Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    
    /*
        We're trying to access a 'Picture Library' located at below URL.
        URL: http://ram2003svr:8080/PictureLibrary1
      
        The below process is similar for accessing a Document Library or Lists like 'Tasks','Announcements', etc.
    */
    
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
 
        //SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges() is mandatory since a user might not have sufficient privileges to access this list.
 
        SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
        {
 
            //SPSite returns the Site Collection object for the URL
 
            using (SPSite spSite = new SPSite("http://ram2003svr:8080/"))    
            {
                /* Returns the object of the site (takes relative site URL after the top-site) which we want to access. 
                In this case, it is BLANK since the site is a top-level site */
 
                using (SPWeb spWeb = spSite.AllWebs[""]) 
                {   
                    //Returns the List object for the Picture Library. Takes the List Name as an argument.
 
                    SPList spList = spWeb.Lists["PictureLibrary1"];
 
                    //Iterate through the SPListItems in the List.
 
                    foreach (SPListItem spListItem in spList.Items)
                    {
                        
                        //You can access the various attributes in the list like 'Name','Title'
 
                        Response.Write("Name of image file : " + spListItem["Name"].ToString() + "<br /><br />");
 
                        Response.Write("Title of image file : " + spListItem["Title"].ToString() + "<br /><br />");
 
                        Response.Write("URL of image file : " + "http://ram2003svr:8080/PictureLibrary1/" + spListItem["Name"].ToString() + "<br /><br />");
                        
                    }
 
                }
            }
 
        });
 
    }
}