Working with the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (part 3) - Working with Objects

1.1. Working with Objects

There are a considerable number of objects available in SharePoint, and as you might expect, there are more available in SharePoint Server than in SharePoint Foundation. By reading this article, you might have determined the relationship between these objects. For example, while a SharePoint farm can contain many Web applications, each SharePoint farm has one configuration database. Many of the SharePoint cmdlets use names that you can easily identify to determine which objects they will manipulate. To illustrate, the SPFarm cmdlets allow you to retrieve information about and back up or restore a SharePoint farm. For example, the SPFarmConfig cmdlet lets you retrieve and set properties for the farm.

However, there are a few cmdlet names that could confuse you. For example, the SPSite cmdlet allows you to manipulate site collections, explains that you can’t create a site collection unless you have a Web application, which means using the SPWebApplication object. When a site collection is created, you choose a site template to create a site. In the SharePoint Object Model, this site is known as a web and not a site; hence, the object is named SPWeb. This can be quite confusing because the term “website” is often shortened to “site,” and in the SharePoint Object Model, “site collection” is also shortened to “site.” Because this terminology has been used through many versions of SharePoint and is used consistently by developers, it is easier for IT professionals to adopt this usage.

• A web is a website and can be manipulated using the SPWeb object.

• A site collection contains a collection of webs and can be manipulated using the SPSite object.

Figure 2 displays the most common objects and their relationships, but there are others, such as SPSiteCollection, which is a collection of SPSites.

The current selection of built-in cmdlets does not provide full coverage of all SharePoint objects, but you can write new cmdlets to manipulate these objects. To determine the objects associated with the SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets and the number of cmdlets per each object, use the commands in the following example, where a portion of the output is shown.

PS C:\Users\peter> Get-Command -PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell" |
>>sort noun, verb | group-object -property noun
>><ENTER>

					  

----- ----                      -----
    1 SPAdminJob                {Start-SPAdminJob}
    4 SPAlternateURL            {Get-SPAlternateURL, New-SPAlternateURL, Rem...
    1 SPApplicationContent      {Install-SPApplicationContent}
    2 SPAssignment              {Start-SPAssignment, Stop-SPAssignment}
...(not all output shown)
    6 SPWeb                     {Export-SPWeb, Get-SPWeb, Import-SPWeb, New-...
    4 SPWebApplication          {Get-SPWebApplication, New-SPWebApplication,...
    1 SPWebApplicationExtension {New-SPWebApplicationExtension}
    2 SPWebApplicationHttpTh... {Disable-SPWebApplicationHttpThrottling, Ena...
    2 SPWebApplicationHttpTh... {Get-SPWebApplicationHttpThrottlingMonitor, ...
    3 SPWebPartPack             {Get-SPWebPartPack, Install-SPWebPartPack, U...
    4 SPWebTemplate             {Get-SPWebTemplate, Install-SPWebTemplate, S...
    2 SPWorkflowConfig          {Get-SPWorkflowConfig, Set-SPWorkflowConfig}