How best to determine if a given url represents an actual SharePoint web site

Question

I have an arbitrary url. I know this url represents some path on my local SharePoint server. With the SharePoint API, I want to know if there is a site corresponding to this url. What's the best way to do this?

I thought this should work:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(url))
{
    using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
    {
        bool exists = web.Exists;
    }
}

But this seems to return true even when the SPWeb isn't really there. For example, if I have an actual site at this url:

http://myserver/a/b

Then the above code returns true if I ask for this site, even when it's not really a provisioned site:

http://myserver/a/b/c

In this case, the reference to "web" is actually the http://myserver/a/b web site, which is not really what I wanted. What's the right way to check to see if this site is really there?

Answer 1

You need to grab the SPWeb associated with the top level, not spsite; here's what I use:

private bool ChildWebExists(SPWeb parentWeb, string childWebName) {   
    using (SPweb childWeb = parentWeb.Webs[childWebName]) {   
        return childWeb.Exists;   
    }   
}

edit: whoops, you're doing the same thing; strange it works like a charm for me.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure I've had mixed results using SPSite(url) and then using site.OpenWeb() which is why I don't try that any more. Assuming your site collection is at http://myserver/a/b, have you tried:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://myserver/a/b"))
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb("/c"))
{
  return web.Exists;
}

I'd try using Reflector but the useful methods are obfuscated.

Answer 3

Sometimes the tricky part is to figure out the URL portion that makes up the SPSite's URL and the relative SPWeb's URL.

Here's some code that works just by taking the full URL (comments welcome, there's always a bug lying around ☺):

    private static bool ExistsWeb(string fullUrl)
    {
        using (SPSite s = new SPSite(fullUrl))
        {
            string webSiteRelUrl = GetWebSiteRelativeUrl(fullUrl, s);
            using (SPWeb w = s.OpenWeb(webSiteRelUrl))
            {
                return (w.Exists);
            }
        }
    }

    private static string GetWebSiteRelativeUrl(string fullUrl, SPSite s)
    {
        string webSiteRelUrl = fullUrl.Replace(s.Url, string.Empty);
        if (webSiteRelUrl.Length >= 1 && webSiteRelUrl[0] == '/')
        {
            if (webSiteRelUrl.Length == 1)
            {
                webSiteRelUrl = string.Empty;
            }
            else
            {
                webSiteRelUrl = webSiteRelUrl.Substring(1);
            }
        }
        return webSiteRelUrl;
    }

Answer 4

I think you could use the standard OpenWeb method. I have described the issue on my blog @ http://blog.mastykarz.nl/inconvenient-opening-spsite-openweb/. While I needed to get the first existing web, you would need to check if there is a site at the exact URL. By using the (string, bool) overload and passing true as the second parameter you should get the job done.