Checking to see if a list exists in SharePoint 2010
Posted
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 3:17 PM
by
CoreyRoth
This is a bitter subject with most MOSS 2007 developers because the most common way to do this is by using a try/catch block when you try to use the indexer on SPListCollection. Well, I am pleased to tell you about a new method I discovered on SPListCollection that really made my day. The new TryGetList method takes the name of a list and will get this, return a null if the list doesn’t exist. Take a look at this code.
using (SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite("http://moss-server"))
{
SPList myCustomList = siteCollection.RootWeb.Lists.TryGetList("MyCustomList");
// doesn't throw exception!
if (myCustomList != null)
{
// do something
}
}
That’s right! You heard me, instead of throwing an exception, you actually get null back when the list doesn’t exist. No more try/catch blocks. No more extension methods to hide those try/catch blocks. Unfortunately, there is nothing on SPBaseCollection to check if an item exists, but I do have a solution, so be looking for that post.