Can you assign your own GUID for a list?

Question

I am trying to assign my own GUID to a list I am creating but am having difficulties. Currently I am creating the list with the code:

site.Lists.Add(CONFIGURATION_LIST_NAME, CONFIGURATION_LIST_DESCRIPTION, SPListTemplateType.GenericList);

Which returns a GUID, but I would like to supply my own. Is there anyway to do this in SharePoint 2010?

Answer 1

No, the guid for the list is used directly by SharePoint to store items in the SQL-tables common to all site collections/sites in a Content database.
If they allowed you to assign that yourselves it would cause problems of people storing information in multiple lists with the same Guid which SharePoint would the read for all of the lists. Which might also allow you to read/write information which you shouldn't have access to.

Even Microsoft got all the checks in place and prevented you from creating new lists with the same guid (also when you moved site collections to new content databases). It would mean that activating your feature in one site collection would disallow it in any other in that database.

So all in all I think it's good you can't control it

Answer 2

In my practice I created lists through CAML

<ListInstance Title="My custom list"
                FeatureId="00BFEA71-DE22-43B2-A848-C05709900100"
                TemplateType="100"
                Id="MyCustomList"
                Description="Simple custom list sample."
                Url="Lists/MyCustomList"
                OnQuickLaunch="true"
                RootWebOnly="false" />

There is a property called URL which you can use to retrieve list

SPWeb.GetList(listUrl)

Thus you can create static class that contains urls instead of IDs. I'm not sure but if you create list through code as you describe in question, the url of list is 'Lists/ListName'.