Best way to get all subsites

Question

I want to create a list of all subsites (all levels), and some details about each of them. The simplest way is to do a recursive function, but I have many subsite (about 600) and I want a more efficient way.

Is SPSiteDataQuery may be appropriate in such a case?

Answer 1

I haven't used SPSiteDataQuery, but I have used PowerShell to return a list of all subsites from a SharePoint Web Application (it returns the title, url, and id of each) and saves it to a CSV file:

Get-SPWebApplication "http://webappname/" | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | Select Title, URL, ID | Export-CSV C:\IterateAllSitesSubsites.ps1.csv -NoTypeInformation

Answer 2

I researched a way to do this before. In my case I needed to get a list of all sites across all site collections and even between multiple farms. I ended up creating my own timer job that ran every hour to update a database where I stored the structure. Also, every evening I ran another timer job to store in a different table who has access to read what site. That way I can easily create a "my team sites" webpart which quickly displays all of the sites a user has access to. With this setup and some column indexing I was able to get my webpart to run in under 2 seconds and sometimes displaying thousands of team sites.