Sandbox: Create subsites from XML

Introduction

Last blog entry I talked about creating publishing pages from an xml file in a sandboxed solution. This time I'm continuing in line with an article about creating subsites based on an xml file in the SiteCollectionsDocuments folder. The code is somewhat simpler since creating subsites in the sandbox is not very difficult, it actually works the same as always.

The most difficult part is to run through the XML recursively since you'll want to be able to create sub-sub-sites in your site collection from one input file.

In the xml-file you detail the url, title, description and the webtemplate name you want to use for a node. You could extend this with the future-webs' LCID.

For the webtemplate you can of course also use a custom solution webtemplate that is deployed to the solution gallery, or the name of a site saved as a template (it will then also end up in the solutions gallery).

The webpart consists of only a button (to run the code) and a label (to display errors). You might see an timeout error when running the code. Since creating websites is a time consuming task, I'm pretty certain the following exception occurs:

• Per Request, with the Request Penalized: There is a hard limit to how long a sandboxed solution can take to be completed. By default, this is 30 seconds. If a sandboxed solution exceeds the limit, the application domain that handles the request (but not the sandboxed worker process) is terminated. This limit is configurable, but only through custom code against the object model. The relevant parts of the object model cannot be accessed by sandboxed solutions, so no sandboxed solution can change the limit.
  However, if certain sites have not been created the code will continue where it left off by creating the sites that don't exist yet when you click the button again
  Here you can find the xml file.
  And here is the code of the visual webpart.

Have fun trying it out! I was just as lazy as the last time so the code now expects the xml file to be exactly the second file in the SiteCollectionDocuments folder :-)