User's Alerts always null

Question

I've set the user alerts fine (I've even checked through the UI that they're there). But when it comes to accessing these Alerts the collection is always null:

I understand that the SPUser must be from the same web in both cases or it can cause a null collection - but they are from the same web.

My method to set the user alerts is:

    public void CreateUserListAlert(SPUser user, SPList list)
    {
        user.ParentWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
        SPAlert alert = user.Alerts.Add();
        alert.AlertType = SPAlertType.List;
        alert.AlertFrequency = SPAlertFrequency.Immediate;
        alert.DeliveryChannels = SPAlertDeliveryChannels.Email;
        alert.List = list;
        alert.Update();
        user.ParentWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;
    }

And the one to retrieve the user alerts: (or attempt to retrieve!)

    public SPAlert GetUserListAlert(SPUser user, SPList list)
    {
        SPAlert alert = null;

        foreach (SPAlert userAlert in user.Alerts)
        {
            if (userAlert.ListID == list.ID)
            {
                alert = userAlert;
                break;
            }
        }

        return alert;
    }

The user that is passed into the latter is:

SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site;
web = site.AllWebs[webId];
web.CurrentUser;

whereas the first method is passed SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser - but both webs are the same - it's just that for the 2nd method I'm not 'in' that web so I can't refer to the current web.

The foreach won't even iterate once - user.Alerts is empty.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I ran into some issues with setting alerts on users. Try setting the alert in the web.alerts collection instead of the user.alerts collection.

You may also want to set the Alert Template programmatically, but I am not sure that is required here.

public void CreateUserListAlert(SPUser user, SPList list) 
{ 
    list.ParentWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true; 


    SPAlert alert = list.parentweb.Alerts.Add();

    alert.AlertTemplate = list.AlertTemplate;
    alert.User = user

    alert.AlertType = SPAlertType.List; 
    alert.AlertFrequency = SPAlertFrequency.Immediate; 
    alert.DeliveryChannels = SPAlertDeliveryChannels.Email; 
    alert.List = list; 
    alert.Update(); 
    user.ParentWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false; 
}