Question

I’m creating a SharePoint application, and am trying some new things to create what amounts to an API for Data Access to maintain consistency and conventions.

I haven’t seen this before, and that makes me think it might be bad 🙂

I’ve overloaded the constructor for class Post to only take an SPListItem as a parameter. I then have an embedded Generic List of Post that takes an SPListItemCollection in the method signature.

I loop through the items in a more efficient for statement, and this means if I ever need to add or modify how the Post object is cast, I can do it in the Class definition for a single source.

class Post
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }

    public Post(SPListItem item)
    {
        ID = item.ID;
        Title = (string)item["Title"];
    }
    public static List<Post> Posts(SPListItemCollection _items)
    {
        var returnlist = new List<Post>();
        for (int i = 0; i < _items.Count; i++) {returnlist.Add(new Post(_items[i]));}
        return returnlist;
    }
}

This enables me to do the following:

    static public List<Post> GetPostsByCommunity(string communityName) 
    {
        var targetList = CoreLists.SystemAccount.Posts(); //CAML emitted for brevity
        return Post.Posts(targetList.GetItems(query)); //Call the constructor
    }

Is this a bad idea?

Answer 1

This approach might be suitable, but that FOR loop causes some concern. _items.Count will force the SPListItemCollection to retrieve ALL those items in the list from the database. With large lists, this could either a) cause a throttling exception, or b) use up a lot of resources. Why not use a FOREACH loop? With that, I think the SPListItems are retrieved and disposed one at a time.

If I were writing this I would have a ‘Posts’ class as well ‘Post’, and give it the constructor accepting the SPListItemCollection.

To be honest, though, the few times I’ve seen people try and wrap SharePoint SPListItems, it’s always ended up seeming more effort than it’s worth.

Also, if you’re using SharePoint 2010, have you considered using SPMetal?