Question

I have a feature receiver (scope=web) which creates subwebs below the web, where the feature is activated. This is used for application installation issues.

Is it necessary to dispose the created subwebs if they are returned from my createSubwebs(SPWeb web) method, which is called in the feature receiver?

Answer 1

Assuming you are creating the webs via SPWebCollection.Add the short answer is yes. SPWeb objects returned by SPWebCollection.Add always have to be disposed.

For more information see the Disposing Objects MSDN article.

Edit:
To clarify “returned for further use”. Let’s assume you have a utility class WebCreator with a method CreateWeb. This method creates a web and returns this web.

public class WebCreator
{ 
  public static SPWeb CreateWeb(SPWeb parent, string name)
  {
    return parent.Webs.Add(name);
  }
}

We should not dispose the SPWeb object in the method CreateWeb since it will be used by the caller. However the caller is responsible to dispose the object.