SharePoint Site Enumeration Page: Get a list of all the sites in your SharePoint farm from Central Administration
Posted: July 25, 2008 Filed under: Application Pages, CustomActions, Development, Feature Development, Features, MOSS, SharePoint, WSS 13 Comments »Updated 8/25/2008: Updates to formatting in code blocks and removed recursive call that was causing duplication.
In my previous post “Iterating through SharePoint Web Applications, Site Collections, and Sites (Webs)” I provided a simple script to iterate through all web applications, sites and site collections. In this post, I will use much of that code to create an application page that returns a list of all the sites in the farm in XML. I will also create a feature to display a link to the application page from the Application Management section in Central Administration.
Click here to download the Solution Package (WSP)
Click here to download the source files
First I create a new file called EnumerateSites.aspx in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\template\admin. I will be accessing the page from the Central Administration site; I prefer to put such pages in the “admin” folder which is not accessible from regular SharePoint sites, as opposed to the “layouts” folder.
Since this file will be returning a list of all the sites in XML, we need to make sure the browser renders it properly. To do so we change the content type of the page to “application/xml”
Next,we create references to the necessary SharePoint and XML assemblies:
Since we are only displaying XML we wont need to reference a master page; so the rest is pretty much the same code from the previous post executing in the OnLoad event of the page. I use the XMLTextWriter class to build the XML document, and incorporate a number of “try catch” statements throughout the code to ensure that any errors that may be encountered are properly displayed in the XML. I’ve pasted all of the code for the application page (including the 2 previous excerpts) below:
protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e){
// Get references to the farm and farm WebService object
// the SPWebService object contains the SPWebApplications
SPFarm thisFarm = SPFarm.Local;
SPWebService service = thisFarm.Services.GetValue(“”);
// Prepare the XML Writer
XmlTextWriter xmlWriter = new XmlTextWriter(Response.OutputStream, Encoding.UTF8);
//Start the XML Document
xmlWriter.WriteStartDocument();
//Create a Web Applications Element
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“webapplications”);
//**********************************************
// NOTE: From here on everything is executed in
// “try catch” blocks. This is done to
// facilitate troubelshooting in case any
// errors surface. The error is caught and
// rendered in an xml “error” element.
// since the pages MIME type has been
// changed to XML, allowing the error
// to surface would render the xml document
// unreadable in IE.
//***********************************************
try
{
//Iterate through each web application
foreach (SPWebApplication webApp in service.WebApplications)
{
//Create an XML Element for each web application
//and include the name in the “name” attribute
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“webapplication”);
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“name”, webApp.DisplayName);
try
{
//Create a sites element for the site collections
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“sites”);
//Iterate through each site collection
foreach (SPSite siteCollection in webApp.Sites)
{
//Create an XML Element for each site collection
//and include the url in the “url” attribute
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“site”);
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“url”, siteCollection.Url);
//call the recursive method to get all the sites(webs)
GetWebs(siteCollection.AllWebs, xmlWriter);
//close the site element
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
}
//close the site collection element
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
}
catch (Exception siteError)
{
//if an error occurs write the error message to
//an error element
xmlWriter.WriteElementString(“error”, siteError.Message);
}
//close the web application element
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
}
}
catch (Exception webAppError)
{
//if an error occurs write the error message to
//an error element
xmlWriter.WriteElementString(“error”, webAppError.Message);
}
// close the web applications element and document
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
xmlWriter.WriteEndDocument();
xmlWriter.Close();
}
//*************************************************
// This method is used recursively to display all
// webs in a site collection. The Web Collection
// from the site collection is passed in along with
// the XML writer to continue writing the XML Document
// where the calling method left off
public void GetWebs(SPWebCollection allWebs, XmlTextWriter xmlWriter)
{
//create a webs element to contain all sites(webs)
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“webs”);
try
{
//iterate through each site(web)
foreach (SPWeb web in allWebs)
{
if (web.Permissions.DoesUserHavePermissions(SPRights.FullMask));
{
//Create an XML Element for each site(web)
//and include attributes for the url, title,
//and template information
xmlWriter.WriteStartElement(“web”);
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“url”,web.Url);
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“title”, web.Title);
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“WebTemplateID”, web.WebTemplateId.ToString());
xmlWriter.WriteAttributeString(“WebTemplateName”, web.WebTemplate);
//close the site(web) element
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
}
}
}
catch (Exception webError)
{
//if an error occurs write the error message to
//an error element
xmlWriter.WriteElementString(“error”, webError.Message);
}
//close the webs element
xmlWriter.WriteEndElement();
}
With the page saved in the admin folder, you could just access it via the URL of your central administration site:
(i.e. http://centraladminsite/_admin/enumeratesites.aspx)
I personally prefer to build a Custom Action which adds a link to the page from Application Management in Central Administration. The steps to do this are relatively simple:
- Create a new folder for the feature and call it “EnumerateSites”. We will use the feature to add a link to the page from Central Administration.
- Open the folder and create a new empty file naming it FEATURE.xml
- Open the file and paste the following XML, replacing NEWGUID with a newly generated GUID.
<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/“
Id=”NEWGUID”
Title=”Enumerate Sites in XML”
Hidden=”FALSE”
Scope=”Farm”
ActivateOnDefault=”TRUE”
Version=”12.0.0.0″> - Save and close the file.
- Create another file, this time naming it “Elements.xml” and paste the following XML, replacing GROUPGUID and ACTIONGUID with newly generated GUIDs (use the same GUID in both occurrences of GROUPGUID):
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/“>
<CustomActionGroup Id="GROUPGUID”
Location=”Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.ApplicationManagement”
Title=”Application Management Utilities” Sequence=”1010” />
<CustomAction
Id=”ACTIONGUID”
GroupId=”GROUPGUID”
Location=”Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.ApplicationManagement”
Sequence=”10” Title=”Enumerate Sites in XML” Description=”“><UrlAction Url="_admin/enumeratesites.aspx” />
- Save and close the file
- Package the EnumerateSites.aspx page and feature using your method of choice. Don’t have one? Checkout WSPBuilder by Carsten Keutmann
- Deploy your solution and you are done!
You can access the page from the Application Management section of Central Administration, you’ll see a new section titled Application Management Utilities with a link to Enumerate Sites in XML.
Click on the link to get an XML page enumerating all of the sites in your farm, it should look similar to the following
Click here to download the Solution Package (WSP)
Click here to download the source files

Yes this is exactly what I was looking for.
Could you tell me how to get the size of each site in a site collection??which property do i hav eto use to get the size of sub sites??? or is there any way to do it?
You can retrieve the size of a site collection via the “Usage” property of the SPSite object. This returns an SPSite.UsageInfo object; the “Storage” property of the “UsageInfo” will give you the size of the Site Collection. I dont know of any similar methods for retrieving the size of site(SPWeb.) A workaround may be to iterate through the files keeping track of a running total; this approach probably wouldnt be to accurate as it wouldnt be taking field data into consideration. You may also consider looking at the usage logs.
Great code, now we want to save off the output into an separate xml file inside the Sharepoint structure. Seems that the Response.OutputStream is what writes it back to screen. We’d like the output be saved off into an xml file dynamically. This is how we can modify it with xlst.
Anonymous, I’m not sure I understand what you are trying to accomplish. If you’d like to apply XSLT to the XML, you can do it from a custom page via the dataform web part. Just make the enumeration page(enumeratesites.aspx) the data source of the dataform webpart and customize the XSLT to your liking.
Good article.So there is no way to acces all websites (or virtual servers) by using the existing sharepoint web services from a remote machine?
Thanks Sihamm.. As far as I know there is no way to retrieve the SPWebApplication object via the OOTB SharePoint Web Services. You could write your own SharePoint Web Service to do it though.
I’ll be giving a SharePoint Developer Training Weekend Crash Course this upcoming March for anybody who is interested. You can check out the full announcement and agenda at < HREF="http://www.rafelo.com/sharepointtraining" REL="nofollow">http://www.rafelo.com/sharepointtraining<>
I always get the access denied error when I try to access the http://servername:portno/_admin/enumeratesites.aspx, evn though I have logged in using Farm administrator
Hi San,
Did you ever solve the access denied error? I’m having the same problem.
Thanks
James
Hi everybody, lets discuss dating sites! I have been registered at the numerous but there was no results, and once I came across the brides agency site and was really amazed! What a wonderful and beautiful girls and women were there!! After a few days of corresponding I realized that I met real love. Now we are together and we are happy! So I do recommend you to visit
http://lerogetour.com/en/dating, you will not regret!
great,, exactly what I was looking for.
Hi, Rafelo,
Looking at the screen after deployment im guessing its sharepoint 2007
Could you please let me know if it is applicable even in Sharepoint 2010 also if there is any links to any such in your blog..
Thanks
Anoop