Getting SPList instances without ArgumentExceptions

Using SharePoint object model can by tricky sometimes. An example of this can be getting an SPList instance from the SPListCollection, when the name being passed to the indexer could be incorrect. SharePoint throws an argument exception when the list of the specified name is not present in the SPListCollection. This can be really irritating as you now have to silently error out the argument exception generated before proceeding further.

I was really bugged by this problem and tried to find a way out. A little introspection with the magical tool known as reflector on the SPListCollection class revealed that there actually is an internal function known as GetListByName which does not throw an exception even when a list is not present. So all I had to do was to call this method reflectively and let it work its magic. I wrote a utility function for the same which solves the most common list collection scenario (i.e.) getting a SPList instance from the list collection of a SPWeb. Following is the utility method. It takes the SPWeb instance and the list name as parameters and returns an SPList object / null.

All comments are welcome on this function and its implementation.

P.S. If you pass the boolean value as true to the Invoke method, the method will return to its default behaviour and start throwing up exceptions.

public static SPList GetListInstanceWithOutTheException(SPWeb web, string listName)
{
try
{
MethodInfo info = typeof(SPListCollection).GetMethod("GetListByName", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod BindingFlags.NonPublic BindingFlags.Instance, null, new Type[] { typeof(System.String), typeof(System.Boolean) }, null);
if (info != null)
{
SPList list = info.Invoke(web.Lists, new object[] { listName , false }) as SPList;
return list;
}
return null;
}
catch (Exception)
{
throw;
}
}

Javascript functions in .NET

I 've been working on MOSS 2007 for the last year or so. Recently, while working on a dashboard, that integrates with Cognos, we realized that the query string parameters to the report were not getting encoded properly. Now I used all that is available in the .NET arsenal for encoding (viz.)
Uri.EscapeDataString, Uri.EscapeUriString, HttpUtility.UrlEncode, HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode, SPHttpUtility.UrlPathEncode etc. but nothing worked. Then we stumbled upon this excellent post by kaushik which educates on functions and methods present in Microsoft.Jscript.dll which allow the use of javascript functions like escape, encodeURI and encodeURIComponent directly within your .NET code. This post helped me trumendously. Thought to share it on my blog. Here's the URL
http://kseesharp.blogspot.com/2008/01/c-equivalent-of-javascript-escape.html

P.S. These methods may not work if you are using window.open function. This function does a decoding of its own before sending the URL out. So in call such cases, the workaround is to use target="_blank" to popup the url in a new window.....