Few years ago I wrote about one problem in OfficeDevPnP method WebExtensions.WebExistsFullUrl: shortly when it was called with url which belongs to non-existent site collection from different managed path it returned true. Full description of the problem is available here: How to check does site collection exist by absolute url using CSOM in Sharepoint. Also I posted issue to PnP-Sites-Core in github: WebExtensions.WebExistsFullUrl returns true for non-existent sites from different managed path in Sharepoint 2013 on-premise. I checked this issue with the latest PnP version (which is 3.26.2010 at the moment of writing of this article) and found that this problem is fixed now by MS. I.e. code of WebExtensions.WebExistsFullUrl method is still the same:
public static bool WebExistsFullUrl(ClientRuntimeContext context, string webFullUrl)
{
bool exists = false;
try
{
using (ClientContext testContext = context.Clone(webFullUrl))
{
testContext.Load(testContext.Web, w => w.Title);
testContext.ExecuteQueryRetry();
exists = true;
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
if (IsUnableToAccessSiteException(ex) || IsCannotGetSiteException(ex))
{
// Site exists, but you don't have access .. not sure if this is really valid
// (I guess if checking if URL is already taken, e.g. want to create a new site
// then this makes sense).
exists = true;
}
}
return exists;
}
but now when we try to clone ClientContext in this line:
ClientContext testContext = context.Clone(webFullUrl))
and webFullUrl corresponds to non-existent site collection from another managed path (e.g. if context was created from the root site collection http://example.com and we pass webFullUrl = http://example.com/sites/som-non-existent-url) it throws System.Exception (System.Net.WebException) now:
The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found
while in earlier CSOM version it created ClientContext for the root site in this case. And as result WebExtensions.WebExistsFullUrl returns false as expected. So fortunately issue was fixed and we can call this method for checking existence of different site collections.
