Awesome. I didn’t know about the other articles in your series. Keep up the good work then. : )

Thanks again – postings and comments like yours will help the SharePoint Devs out there to get a better understanding of the internals of SharePoint and how to best use it

First, you should very rarely use a for index to iterate any collection in SharePoint. The SharePoint API will “do the right thing” (including using cache when appropriate, using good SQL query techniques, and the pre-creation of the next object in anticipation of the likely continued loop) in most circumstances when you use foreach for iteration instead. So, the code above would better be written as follows:

SPListItemCollection items =
SPContext.Current.List.Items;
foreach(SPListItem item in items)
{
htmlWriter.Write(item["Title"]);
}

Not only is this more performant but it is easier to read so general supportability will improve too. I’ll leave the suspicious SPContext.Current.List and htmlWriter for someone else to take issue with.

Second, retrieving the entire SPListItemCollection into memory can have it’s own set of problems. Consider the situation where there are thousands of list items with dozens of columns. That will produce quite a memory footprint just to write out the title of each SPListItem.

I would highly recommend that you consider a CAML query that restricts the fields and may even filter the list items retrieved (or use LINQ to SharePoint 2010 which will generate a CAML query) and the GetItems method.

The following example code will run in a Console App and it reads the SPListItem with a Title of “One” from the Tasks list in a Site Collection found at http://localhost. Even though this includes a sort, it is far more performant than the iteration originally demonstrated in this blog post. I parsed it down to just the Title of a single SPListItem to give the most comprehensive yet still simple example:

using (SPSite siteCollection =
new SPSite(“http://localhost”))
{
SPWeb web = siteCollection.RootWeb;
SPList list = web.Lists["Tasks"];

if (null != list)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.Append(“”)
.Append(” “)
.Append(” “)
.Append(” One”)
.Append(” “)
.Append(“”)
.Append(“”)
.Append(” “)
.Append(“”);

SPQuery qry = new SPQuery();
qry.ViewFields = “”;
qry.Query = sb.ToString();
qry.ViewFieldsOnly = True;

SPListItemCollection items = list.GetItems(qry);
foreach (SPListItem item in items)
{
Console.WriteLine(item["Title"]);
}
}

Console.WriteLine(“—Done”);
Console.ReadLine();
}

For even more robust sample code, see the ViewFields entry in the SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spquery.viewfields.aspx

HTH,

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687949.aspx