Getting a SharePoint Field Value In C#

Someone asked me this morning when doing a code review of my code how I got a field value. They were not looking very closely. Here is how I do it, although there are 50,000 other ways of doing it.

This is my getFieldValue helper method, that will be called at other instance points throughout the code.

PLAIN TEXT

C#:

public static string getFieldValue(SPListItem listItem, string fieldName)
{
string text = string.Empty;
if (fieldName == string.Empty)
{
return text;
}
try
{
object myObj = listItem[fieldName];
return ((myObj != null) ? myObj.ToString() : string.Empty);
}
catch
{
return string.Empty;
}
}

Once the helper method is defined, then it can be consumed in something like a foreach loop to return SharePoint list items based on conditions. If the condition is not met, it will return null.

PLAIN TEXT

C#:

private SPListItem getItemText(SPListItemCollection spItems, string text)
{
foreach (SPListItem item in spItems)
{
if (getFieldValue(item, this.myList.myColumn) == text)
{
return item;
}
}
return null;
}

Article Or Research Filed Under SharePoint Development.

3 Comments »

Very nice method and a good coding practice. Nice work.

Comment by John — April 9, 2009 @ 4:27 am
Does not always work. If i create a column “project”, then delete it, then create a column “project” again, it’s field name is actually now “project0″ despite visibly showing project.

Comment by Jeff — March 25, 2010 @ 2:10 pm
skip all that – it’s still funky. the reason is that display name and internal name arent always the same…and this only works when they are the same. Something like this might be a bit more stable if columns ever change (i’ve crunched the code for brevity):

SPListItemCollection qItems = splc["ListName"].GetItems(query);
…
foreach (SPListItem spli in qItems)
{
fieldValue = spli[spli.Fields.GetField("ColName").InternalName];
}

Comment by Jeff — March 25, 2010 @ 2:55 pm