Month: July 2011

Managing SharePoint 2010 Access Request Settings Via PowerShell

SharePoint has a built-in mechanism to manage access requests. Users can request access to sites and documents when they are denied access, or they can request additional privileges to update content if they only have read access.

The requests go to one or more email addresses which are defined at the site level. The definitions follow inheritance, meaning that if a child site inherits its parent’s permissions, the child site will inherit the access request settings as well. The property to check if a site is inheriting permissions is named HasUniqueRoleDefinitions.

There are two properties which control the access request configuration, first is RequestAccessEnabled, a Boolean flag which turns on or off the access request feature for the site. The second property defines one or more email addresses where requests will be sent to. It is named RequestAccessEmail. To specify multiple email addresses, separate each with a semicolon. The image below illustrates the GUI for modifying these two properties. It is accessed on the site permissions page, on the far right of the ribbon.

Today I will share some sample code which walks through every site collection and site within a given web application, and writes to the screen the relevant access request settings.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell
$webapp = Get-SPWebApplication "Portal Home"
foreach($spsite in $webapp.Sites)
{
   foreach($web in $spsite.AllWebs)
   {
      Write-Host "On Web" $web.Title ", URL" $web.URL
      if (!$web.HasUniqueRoleDefinitions) {
         Write-Host "`tAccess request settings inherited from parent."
      }
      if ($web.RequestAccessEnabled) {
         Write-Host "`tAccess requests go to :" $web.RequestAccessEmail
      }
      else {
         Write-Host "`tAccess requests are disabled."
      }
   }
}

How to drop many databases which share a common prefix

I recently used AutoSPInstaller to deploy 2010 into a production farm. It provides a great way to automate and reproduce installations. As a great side benefit, it creates all SharePoint databases with the same prefix. After a few runs in a lab environment, I wanted to clean up old SQL databases. Using SSMS to delete databases is very tedious, however, since it only allows you to do one at a time. I wanted an easy way to remove all databases with a common prefix. A Google search yielded a method, but it needed some tweaking to get it to work for me. Below are the steps I used.

1. Run this query to generate a list of commands. In place of “dev_farm” use the prefix of the databases you want to delete.

SELECT ‘ DROP DATABASE ‘ + ‘[‘ + NAME + ‘]’ FROM sys.sysdatabases where name like ‘dev_farm%’

2. In the results window, right click and Select All


3. Right click and choose Copy


4. Paste into a new query window. At the top add USE [master], GO and GO at the end and execute.
As a reference, note the SSMS delete database action creates this query:

EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_delete_database_backuphistory @database_name = N’WIN-SP_AdminContentDB’
GO
USE [master]
GO
/****** Object: Database [WIN-SP_AdminContentDB] Script Date: 07/12/2011 15:55:08 ******/
DROP DATABASE [WIN-SP_AdminContentDB]
GO

It differs in that it removes the backup history of the database first. In my environment, I didn’t have backup history for these databases, so this wasn’t a concern.