Bill Baer /bɛːr/

I recently received a request asking 1) if a site collections portal site connection can be programmatically replaced or modified and 2) can this be accomplished on a schedule without implementing a provisioning intercept or callback based on Site Directory metadata.

First let’s examine the first question:

1. Can a site collections portal site connection be programmatically replaced or modified…the simple answer is yes.  Using the Sites property of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.WebApplication class to return a SPSiteCollection object representing a collection of site collections on a Web application.  Using the Sites property you can use an indexer to return a single site collection from the collection or alternately return all site collections in the collection.

In the latter you can use a local variable siteUrl to get the requested Web application or optionally specify a Url using System.Uri uri = new System.Uri(http://contoso);.  The sample code below uses a siteUrl local variable that can be passed as an argument in a console application.

            SPFarm GlobalAdministration = new SPFarm();
            System.Uri uri = new System.Uri(http://www.contoso.com);
            SPWebApplication WebApplication = SPWebApplication.Lookup(uri);
            SPSiteCollection SiteCollections = WebApplication.Sites;

Now that you’ve associated a Web application with the request you can iterate through the site collections in the collection:

foreach (SPSite SiteCollection in SiteCollections)
{

To update the portal site connection you can:

SiteCollection.PortalName = "Contoso Home";
SiteCollection.PortalUrl = [http://www.consoto.com](http://www.consoto.com/);

Putting it all together:

            SPFarm GlobalAdministration = new SPFarm();
            System.Uri uri = new System.Uri(http://www.contoso.com);
            SPWebApplication WebApplication = SPWebApplication.Lookup(uri);
            SPSiteCollection SiteCollections = WebApplication.Sites;
            Console.WriteLine("Web Application: " + WebApplication.DisplayName.ToString());
            foreach (SPSite SiteCollection in SiteCollections)
            {
                        SiteCollection.PortalName = "Contoso Home";
                        SiteCollection.PortalUrl = "http://www.consoto.com";
        }
    }
    }
}

This code snippet is provided under the Microsoft Permissive License.

Now that we understand how to manipulate the portal site connection for a site collection we need to set the portal site Url based on a value in the existing Site Directory taxonomy.  You can use the SPListIemCollection Class (Microsoft.SharePoint) to return the collection of items for a List (Site Directory) using the Items property or one of the GetItems methods of the SPList class.  To return a single list item from the collection such as a taxonomy component use an indexer, in example the Site Directory uses a List (Sites) to host the List items – so the collection is assigned to a variable named Sites, use Sites[index] in C# or Sites(index) in VB 2005 where index would be the display name of a List field such as Division.  With the SiteDirectory metadata a portal site connection can be correlated using C#

If <condition> Then

statements.

Windows SharePoint Services SDK Documentation

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264594.aspx

For additional information on using the SPListItemCollection Class see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms417004.aspx.

Happy coding…