Working with webs

In SharePoint there are site collections and inside a site collection you have at least one web (the root web), which on it's own can have other webs (child webs). Quite often when talking about a web the term site or sub site is used. When using the PnP Core SDK a site collection is referred to via the ISite interface while a web (root web, child web or sub web) is defined via the IWeb interface.

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 show below:

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

Getting a web

A PnPContext always has a reference to the ISite of the underlying site collection and the IWeb of the connected site, so getting the current Web is as a simple as using the Web property on the PnPContext. When a context is created the Site and Web properties are loaded with some elementary properties like Id, Url and RegionalSettings.

var web = context.Web;
var id = web.Id;

If you want to load additional web properties you can do that via using one of the Load/Get methods:

// Load the root folder 
await context.Web.LoadAsync(p => p.RootFolder);

// Load the title and content types and lists. For content types ans lists load additional properties
var web = await context.Web.GetAsync(p => p.Title,
                           p => p.ContentTypes.QueryProperties(p => p.Name),
                           p => p.Lists.QueryProperties(p => p.Id, p => p.Title, p => p.DocumentTemplate));

Getting sub webs

A web can have zero or more sub webs and to load these you use the Webs property and enumerate over the sub webs of the current web:

Important

When you want to work with the sub web you need to create a new PnPContext for the sub web as shown in below sample

// Load the sub webs
await context.Web.LoadAsync(p => p.Webs);

foreach (var subWeb in context.Web.Webs.AsRequested())
{
    using (var contextSubWeb = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync(subWeb.Url))
    {
        // Work with the found web
    }
}

Adding a web

Adding a web can be done using one of the Add methods in combination with specifying the information for the new web via the WebOptions class.

// add a new web to the current web, uses default web template (STS#3) and default language (1033)
var addedWeb = await context.Web.Webs.AddAsync(new WebOptions { Title = "My web", Url = "myweb" });

using (var contextAddedWeb = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync(addedWeb.Url))
{
    // Work with the added web
}

Updating a web

To update a web you can set the relevant web properties and call one of the update methods:

// Load the web title
var web = await context.Web.GetAsync(p => p.Title);

web.Title = "PnP Rocks!";
await web.UpdateAsync();

Web property bag

Each web also has a so called property bag, a list key/value pairs providing more information about the web. You can read this property bag, provided via the IWeb AllProperties property, and add new key/value pairs to it.

// Load the web property bag
var web = await context.Web.GetAsync(p => p.AllProperties);

// Enumerate the web property bag
foreach(var property in web.AllProperties)
{
    // Do something with the property
}

// Add a new property
web.AllProperties["myPropertyKey"] = "Some value";
await web.AllProperties.UpdateAsync();

// Clear a property
web.AllProperties["myPropertyKey"] = null;
await web.AllProperties.UpdateAsync();

Deleting a web

Deleting a web is a different compared to other deletes in PnP Core SDK: you can't delete the "current" loaded web, you can however delete another web using either the Delete or DeleteAsync methods.

Note

The batch methods (DeleteBatch and DeleteBatchAsync) cannot be used to delete a web.

// add a new web to the current web, uses default web template (STS#3) and default language (1033)
var addedWeb = await context.Web.Webs.AddAsync(new WebOptions { Title = "My web", Url = "myweb" });

// WORKS: delete added web
await addedWeb.DeleteAsync();

// DOES NOT WORK: deleting the current web
await context.Web.DeleteAsync();

Getting changes for a web

You can use the GetChanges methods on an IWeb to list all the changes. See Enumerating changes that happened in SharePoint to learn more.

Re-indexing a web

SharePoint will index the content added in a web automatically. Typically re-indexing is not needed, but whenever you make changes to the search schema (managed and crawled property settings) these will not be automatically picked up, thus requiring a re-indexing of the list or complete site. Re-indexing of a web is done using the ReIndex methods:

// Reindex the web
await context.Web.ReIndexAsync();

Note

When the web is configured for no-script, like is the case for all modern site types, then re-indexing of the web will happen by re-indexing each individual list.