Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 : Using SharePoint Commands (part 5) - Working with Objects Below the Web Level

Working with Objects Below the Web Level

As mentioned earlier, SharePoint PowerShell commands generally work from the SPWeb object and above. That means you will not find commands such as Get-SPList or New-SPLibrary in the out-of-the-box commands. However, with a little digging, and liberal usage of the Get-Member cmdlet, you can use PowerShell and the object model to list a web’s lists and libraries, as well as add and then remove a SharePoint list. That provides you with the foundation to move beyond the commands supplied by SharePoint 2013.

Lists and libraries are child objects of the SPWeb object you just looked at. The SPWeb object contains a single property, Lists, which is a collection of all its lists and libraries. To retrieve all the lists and libraries of a specific web, you can use the following command, as shown in Figure 16, within the Management Shell or a host with the SharePoint commands registered:

FIGURE 16

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).Lists

In all likelihood, a lot of text is flying across your screen now as all the properties of all the lists and libraries are displayed. Unlike the previous SharePoint objects you have worked with, the SPList list object that is returned from the preceding command does not have a defined default format; therefore, PowerShell dumps all the properties.

None of us can read that fast. Fortunately, you can control how each list is formatted and slow down some of that flying text. Run the same command, but this time send the lists and libraries out to Format-Table, another PowerShell formatting command, shown in Figure 17:

FIGURE 17

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).lists | Sort-Object Title | 
Format-Table Title, Id, ItemCount, hasUniqueRoleAssignments, 
EnabledAttachments, EnableThrottling

Now that you know how to retrieve all the lists and libraries contained within a SharePoint web, the following example demonstrates how to get just one specific list. The Lists property on the SPWeb object returns a collection of lists, like many of the properties associated with SharePoint objects. You can retrieve any list by using the index, ID, or title. For example, to get the third item in the lists collection, use the following:

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).lists[2] | 
Format-Table Title, Id, 
ItemCount, hasUniqueRoleAssignments, 
EnabledAttachments, EnableThrottling

In the preceding example, note that the value 2 is used, rather than 3, because developers like to start counting at 0. Therefore, the first item in a collection is number 0, so the third item is 2.

As mentioned previously, you can also get a list by using the ID or list title. Simply replace the number 2 with the ID or Title:

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).lists["Posts"] | 
Format-Table Title, Id, ItemCount, hasUniqueRoleAssignments, 
EnabledAttachments, EnableThrottling

At this point, you know how to get down to the list level and enumerate all of your lists and libraries. Creating a new list is a little tricky. First, you need to decide what type of list you will create. To keep it simple, the next example creates a Links list. The Links list template has an ID of 103, which is information you can find by looking in the SharePoint documentation. You can also get this information by running the following command:

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).ListTemplates | 
Where-Object {$_.Name –eq "Links"}

To create the Links list, you need to call the Add method of the List collection you have already been working with. The Add method requires three parameters for this example: Title, Description, and ListTemplateId. Armed with all this information, add that list using the following command:

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).Lists.Add("Demo Links List", 
"This is the description", 103)

Figure 18 shows the new, improved list of lists — now sporting a new Links list.

FIGURE 18

Finally, to close out this section you will delete your list. Yes, delete; not remove. The Delete method is a method of the SPListCollection object (the Lists property), not a command in PowerShell, which is why you can use it. The Delete method of the List collection requires the list ID, so you are going to use a variable this time to grab the list ID in one line and use it in the Delete on the next line. Following are the two lines needed to delete the list you just created (Figure 19 shows what it looks like):

FIGURE 19

$listId = (Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).
lists["Demo Links List"].Id
 
(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).lists.Delete($listId)

Again, you can verify that you did indeed remove the list by using the following command to list all your lists.

(Get-SPWeb http://portal.contoso.com/team/blog).lists | Sort-Object Title | 
Format-Table Title, Id, ItemCount, hasUniqueRoleAssignments, 
EnabledAttachments, EnableThrottling