Get list of all features (installed and not active) on site? Trying to use FeatureDefinitions?

Question

I have an issue trying to get all the installed (not activated) features in SharePoint 2010. I have one site and site collection and what I want to do is have one feature that activates all my features at the site and web scopes. I am trying to get a list of the current installed but not activated features.

SPFeatureDefinitionCollection featureDefinitions = SPContext.Current.Site.FeatureDefinitions;

While using the debugger this returns empty and does not contain any features installed, active, or not active. If I use:

SPContext.Current.Site.Features

It only returns the active features. I was trying to follow this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5169848/how-to-check-whether-a-feature-has-been-activated but it does not seem to work for me. The scope of the feature containing the code is "Site"

Answer 1

You can try something like this in powershell.

$allSiteFeatures = Get-SPFeature | Where-Object { $_.Scope -eq "Site" }
$activeFeatures = Get-SPFeature -Site "http://sitecollectionUrl"

$allSiteFeatures | ForEach-Object {
$active = $false
    foreach($feature in $activeFeatures)
    {
      if($feature.Id.ToString() -eq $_.Id.ToString())
      {
         $active = $true
      }
    }
    if(!$active)
    {
       $_.DisplayName
    }
}

If you would like to use c# then SPFarm.FeatureDefinitions should give you a collection of feature definitions which you can filter by scope