$SPWeb.GetList - Exception

Question

I am trying to get a list using PowerShell, so I am executing this code:

 $list = $web.GetList($web.Url +"lists/TestList")

It's giving me:

Exception calling "GetList" with "1" argument(s): "0x80070002" At line:1 char:1 + $list= $web.GetList($web.Url +"lists/TestList") + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : FileNotFoundException

How do I get a list by its Title, if I run this:

$list = $web.Lists | ? {$_.Title -eq "TestList"}

Wouldn't this loop through all lists in the site which will be bad for performance? Thanks for any hint to guide me to the right direction.

Answer 1

Inspect the result of your request string

 $list = $web.GetList($web.Url +"lists/TestList")

my guess is that you get something like https://weburllists/testlist - try adding the leading slash in your query.

$list = $web.GetList($web.Url +"/lists/TestList")

Another way is to use the Lists method.

$list = $web.Lists["listname"]

Answer 2

I believe GetList method requires server relative url as a parameter. Please check this thread for details. You can try to use web.ServerRelativeUrl instead of web.Url but getting list by title is also not a bad idea.

$list = $web.Lists["ListTitle"]

It will enumerate all lists on your site, but it's pretty fast and you can ignore this little impact in a script.

Answer 3

You can also use

 $list = $web.Lists.TryGetList("Title of list")

This will never throw an error, but $list will be null if no list with that title is found in the web

Answer 4

Yes, what I do is make use of the Measure-Command

Measure-Command {
$list = $web.Lists | ? {$_.Title -eq "TestList"}
}

Specifying an itemid, url, and such is always better than a where clause.

Answer 5

For googlers searching for "Get-SPWeb GetList MethodInvokationException":

In my case we had a script that used

$web = Get-SPWeb -Site $url

Here, the root web and all subwebs of the site collection will be returned and stored in the $web variable - which is equivalent to the C# version

using (var site = new SPSite(url))
using (var web = site.OpenWeb())
{ ... }

to get the SPSite's root web if and only if the site collection contains only the root web. But loading a list via $web.GetList("foo") where $web is actually a collection of SPWebs fails with a MethodInvokationException.

So you might want to check if your site collection contains subwebs.