How to quickly find a sharepoint document library by id?

Question

Given the SPList.ID and a site collection (or an SPWeb with subwebs), how do I quickly find the document library with the given ID?

I can recursively enumerate through all webs and perform a web.Lists[guid] on each one of them, but there might be thousands of subwebs in my case, and I'm looking for a realtime solution.

If there is no way to do this quickly, any other suggestions on how to uniquely identify a document library? I could store the full path (url), but the identification will be publicly visible and I don't feel very comfortable giving away our exact SharePoint document structure like that. Should I resort to maintaining a manual ID <-> library mapping in a separate list?

Answer 1

MS does not support this :)... But take a look at this for giggles: http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jhermiz/archive/2007/08/15/60288.aspx

Answer 2

I vote for the manual ID -> URL pair matching in a top-level, well-known list that's visible only to the elevated privileges account.

Answer 3

If you have MOSS Search available, then it might help, depending on the lag you have between these lists getting created and needing to search for them. You could probably map list id as a managed property and do a quick search for list objects with the id in question.

For lots of classes of problems it seems like search is the fastest way to rip through huge sets of data. In fact if this approach worked for you, you really wouldn't even need to know the site collection up front. Don't have access to any of my MOSS environments at the moment, so can't verify this will work though.

Answer 4

Since you are storing the ListID somewhere, you may also store the WebId. Lists are opened by the context SPWeb always, so if you go to:

http://toplevel/_layouts/ListGeneralSettings.aspx?ID={GUID1} // OK
http://toplevel/sub1/_layouts/ListGeneralSettings.aspx?ID={GUID1} // Wont Work (same Guid)

Having the WebId and ListId you can simply:

using(SPWeb subweb = (new SPSite("http://url")).OpenWeb(new Guid("{000...}")))
{
    SPList list = subweb.Lists.GetList(new Guid("{111...}"), true);
    // list logic
}