Working with Teams: Channels

Within Teams, you have one or more channels. This page will show you how you can Get, Create, Update and Delete channels.

Creating Context

In 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 show below:

using (var context = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync("SiteToWorkWith"))
{
    // See next chapter on how to use the PnPContext for working with Teams
}

Getting Channels

Channels is a collection part of the ITeam interface, so when you get a team, you can include the channels on the request.

// Get the Team
 var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(o => o.Channels);

// Get the Channels
 var channels = team.Channels;

Getting Channels with specific properties

When you want to load the Team and Channels with specific properties populated, you can specify which properties to include by:

// Get the Team
 var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(
    p => p.Channels.QueryProperties(p => p.DisplayName));

Getting a specific Channel

If you would like to get a specific channel you can use the extension method GetByDisplayNameAsync to get the channel by name.

// Get the Team
 var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(o => o.Channels);

// Get the Channel 
var generalChannel = await team.Channels.GetByDisplayNameAsync("General");

Getting the default channel

Alternatively, if you are looking for the default channel within a Team, you can retrieve this with the following:

// Get the Team
var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(o => o.PrimaryChannel);
 
// Get the primary channel
var primaryChannel = await team.PrimaryChannel;

Getting access to the Channel's files

The files of a Team channel are hosted in the connected SharePoint site. Using the GetFilesFolder methods you can get the IFolder that's hosting the files of this channel and once you've the IFolder you can use all of SharePoint's advanced file capabilities to manage (e.g. enumerate, upload, download, share, publish, recycle, delete,...) the files in this Teams channel.

// Get the Team primary channel
var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(o => o.PrimaryChannel);

var folder = await team.PrimaryChannel.GetFilesFolderAsync(p => p.Files);

foreach(var file in folder.Files.AsRequested())
{
    // Do something with the file
}

Creating Channels

To add a new channel, call the Add method, specifying a name and optionally a description. When you want to create a private or shared channel use the TeamChannelOptions class as input.

// Get the Team
var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(p => p.Channels);

string channelName = $"My Cool New Channel";

// Check if the channel exists
var channelFound = team.Channels.Where(p => p.DisplayName == channelName).FirstOrDefault();
if (channelFound == null)
{
    // Add a new channel
    channelFound = await team.Channels.AddAsync(channelName, "This is my cool new Channel, check this out!");

    // Add the channel as private
    channelFound = await team.Channels.AddAsync(channelName, new TeamChannelOptions
    { 
        Description = "This is my cool new Channel, check this out!", 
        MembershipType = TeamChannelMembershipType.Private
    });
}

Tip

When working with channels these are some tips to help:

• Channel Names must be unique
• Check if the channel already exists, to avoid trying to add a Channel with an existing name

Updating Channels

You can update the channel by changing the properties you wish update and call the update method:

// Get the Team
var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(p => p.Channels);

string channelName = $"My Cool New Channel";

// Get the channel you wish to update
var channelToUpdate = team.Channels.Where(p => p.DisplayName == channelName).FirstOrDefault();

if(channelToUpdate != default
{
    string newChannelDescription = $"This cool channel is being updated!";
    channelToUpdate.Description = newChannelDescription;
    
    // Perform the update to the channel    
    await channelToUpdate.UpdateAsync();
}

Deleting Channels

You can delete the channel with the following example:

var team = await context.Team.GetAsync(p => p.Channels);

string channelName = $"My Cool New Channel";

// Get the channel you wish to delete
var channelToDelete = team.Channels.Where(p => p.DisplayName == channelName).FirstOrDefault();

if(channelToDelete != default)
{    
    // Perform the delete operation
    await channelToUpdate.DeleteAsync();
}

Note

You cannot delete the General Channel, this operation is not supported by the service. Additionally, channels are soft-deleted for 30 days, before which counts towards the total limit of channels per Team, for further details on the limits, please refer to Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams