What options are available to me to find lists that were created using a specific list definition?

Question

I have many lists, some of which were created using a custom and now-obsolete list definition. I need a programmatic way of finding out which lists were created using that old definition.

Currently my workaround is to check the ServerTemplate attribute in the list's PropertiesXml:

SPList.PropertiesXml.Contains(string.Format("ServerTemplate=\"{0}\"", oldTemplateId))

Is there a method to do this without iterating through lists and comparing properties? Are there any other properties I can use to identify which list definition the list is based on?

Answer 1

The SPList.BaseTemplate property tells you what list definition was used to create a given list.

Also, LINQ is by far the most efficient way to query all the lists in your site -- and this could obviously be extrapolated to query all lists within an entire site collection too (see Example 2 here). Creating nested "foreach" loops to manually enumerate all your sites, webs and lists can be very onerous on your system, be warned!

Here is some sample code to get you started:

var obsoleteLists = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists.Cast<SPList>().Where(l => (int)l.BaseTemplate == 10000);

foreach (SPList list in obsoleteLists) 
{ 
    Console.WriteLine("The {0} list was created using the {1} definition.", list.Title, list.BaseTemplate);
}

NOTE: This code assumes that your custom list definition has an ID of 10000. You could replace this with any of the built-in SPListTemplateType values if you were querying for any OOTB list types, e.g. SPListTemplateType.Announcements

Answer 2

You should be able to tweak this code to get what you are looking for.

http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/monnette_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=22

Good luck.

Answer 3

this may be of help to get you started - Viewing SharePoint properties as lists, tables and CSV in PowerShell

You can also dig into the list properties using SPManager.

[UPDATE] from first link item -

$web = Get-SPWeb http:/fooSite/
$list = $web.Lists["fooList"] 
$list  #this would give you all the properties including the TemplateFeatureId, SchemaXML, BaseTemplate, PropertiesXML, ServerTemplate, etc..