Content following APIs

Content following APIs allow you to manage different aspects of content following: follow/stop following users, docs, sites and tags, getting followers and checking whether you follow specific content or not.

In the remainder of this article you'll see a lot of context use: in this case this is a PnPContext which was obtained via the PnPContextFactory as explained in the overview article and shown below:

using (var context = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync("SiteToWorkWith"))
{
}

Get the general social following information for the current user

This information contains MyFollowedDocumentsUri - the url to see all documents the user is following, MyFollowedSitesUri - the url to see all sites the user is following, and the SocialActor - an object, which represents information about the current user (account name, email, status and other properties). To get the social following information, call GetFollowingInfo:

var info = await context.Social.Following.GetFollowingInfoAsync();

Follow the content

You can follow 4 types of entities in SharePoint using social API: a tag, a site, a document and a user. To follow the content, use the corresponding method Follow. As an argument you should pass an instance of an object, which represents specific following request:

// follow a site
var result = await context.Social.Following.FollowAsync(new FollowSiteData
{
    ContentUri = context.Uri.AbsoluteUri
});

// follow a document
var result = await context.Social.Following.FollowAsync(new FollowDocumentData
{
    ContentUri = $"{siteUrl}/Shared Documents/test.docx"
});

// follow a user
var accountName = "i:0#.f|membership|admin@m365x790252.onmicrosoft.com";
var result = await context.Social.Following.FollowAsync(new FollowPersonData
{
    AccountName = accountName
});

// follow a tag
var result = await context.Social.Following.FollowAsync(new FollowTagData
{
    TagGuid = new Guid("4fd0d107-8df7-4ace-bffc-72aa0f9a736a")
});

The result is an enum, which contains the outcome - either Ok, AlreadyFollowing, LimitReached or InternalError if something went wrong.

Stop following the content

From the code perspective stop following works very similarly to the Follow, except that the method name is StopFollowing. For example, to stop following a site, you should call:

await context.Social.Following.StopFollowingAsync(new FollowSiteData
{
    ContentUri = context.Uri.AbsoluteUri
});

To stop following another object just use the right FollowData instance.

Check whether you follow specific content

var followData = new FollowSiteData
{
    ContentUri = context.Uri.AbsoluteUri
};
var isFollowed = await context.Social.Following.IsFollowed(followData);

The code above checks if the current user is following a site. To check other content (persons, docs and tags) you should use the corresponding FollowData object.

Get people, who follow the specified user

To get a list of people, who follow the specified user, use code below:

var accountName = "i:0#.f|membership|admin@m365x790252.onmicrosoft.com";
IList<IPersonProperties> followers = await context.Social.Following.GetFollowersForAsync(accountName);

Gets the people who the specified user is following

As an opposite to GetFollowersFor, the below method returns a collection of people, who the specified user is following:

var accountName = "i:0#.f|membership|admin@m365x790252.onmicrosoft.com";
IList<IPersonProperties> followers = await context.Social.Following.GetPeopleFollowedByAsync(accountName);

Check if the current user is following another user

var accountName = "i:0#.f|membership|admin@m365x790252.onmicrosoft.com";
bool isFollowing = await context.Social.Following.AmIFollowingAsync(accountName);

The code checks whether the current user is following the specified user.

Check if the current user is followed by another user

The opposite to AmIFollowing is AmIFollowedBy. It checks whether the current user is in the followers list for another user:

var accountName = "i:0#.f|membership|admin@m365x790252.onmicrosoft.com";
bool followed = context.Social.Following.AmIFollowedBy(accountName);

Get the content, followed by me

As shown before, a user can follow a tag, a document, a person or a site. The FollowedByMe method returns the content, which the current user is following:

IList<ISocialActor> myFollowingSites = await context.Social.Following.FollowedByMeAsync(SocialActorTypes.Sites);

In the parameter you can specify which content you want to receive back. If you need more than one content type per request, you can apply bitwise operation, i.e.:

IList<ISocialActor> myFollowingSitesAndUsers = await context.Social.Following.FollowedByMeAsync(SocialActorTypes.Users | SocialActorTypes.Sites);

SocialActorTypes also contains some special content types like WithinLast24Hours, All and some other.

Count the number of following content

To count on how many sites, tags, documents or users you're following, use FollowedByMeCount. This method counts following content and returns a number:

int count = await context.Social.Following.FollowedByMeCountAsync(SocialActorTypes.Users | SocialActorTypes.Sites);

It accepts the same SocialActorTypes enum so that you can filter on the following content according to your needs.

Get my followers

With social following API you can get all current user's followers:

IList<ISocialActor> followers = await context.Social.Following.MyFollowersAsync();

Get user suggestions

It's possible to get the list of users, who the current user might want to follow:

IList<ISocialActor> suggestions = await context.Social.Following.MySuggestionsAsync();