Harnessing SharePoint OOTB Events with PnP Commands for Automated Permission Updates & Efficient Operations

Introduction

In SharePoint Online, automating operations in response to internal events — such as the creation of new site groups or granting permissions — can significantly streamline administrative tasks. This is particularly vital in environments with multiple associated sites where permissions need to be synchronized regularly. Here's how we can use SharePoint's OOTB events to improve operational efficiency and ensure timely updates across sites.

Challenges in Synchronizing Permissions

Consider a typical scenario in a SharePoint environment with one hub site and several associate sites. When a new user is added to a group in the hub site, the same user must be added across all associated sites. 

If we use the Logic App or Power Automate to sync the permission across all these sites it would require daily SharePoint group checks, leading to permissions synchronization delays.

Innovative Solution Using PnP Commands

To address this delay, we leveraged SharePoint PnP (Patterns and Practices) commands to trigger Flows or Azure Functions directly via HTTP when specific OOTB events occur. This method provides immediate event details such as usernames and group names, which can then be used to synchronize user permissions across sites instantly.

Setup and Configuration

We set up event receivers in SharePoint that respond to specific user group changes. Here are the PnP PowerShell commands used to configure these event receivers:

1. When a User is Added:

 Add-PnPEventReceiver -Name "GroupUserAdded" -Url $functionUrlToAddUser -EventReceiverType GroupUserAdded -Synchronization Asynchronous  

2. When a User is Removed:

 Add-PnPEventReceiver -Name "GroupUserDeleted" -Url $functionUrlToRemoveUser -EventReceiverType GroupUserDeleted -Synchronization Asynchronous  

These commands integrate two Azure Functions: the first triggers when a user is added to any SharePoint group on the Hub site, and the second when a user is removed. This setup ensures that any modifications to user groups are immediately reflected across all associated sites without the need for manual intervention.

Benefits and Capabilities

By leveraging OOTB events, we can perform a variety of operations that respond dynamically to changes within the SharePoint environment. These include but are not limited to:

• Adding, updating, or deleting items, lists, and sites
• Managing group and role definitions and assignments
• Handling file movements and attachment operations

Conclusion

Utilizing SharePoint's OOTB events with PnP commands to trigger automated actions eliminates delays inherent in daily synchronization tasks. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also improves user experience by ensuring that permissions and other configurations are consistently up-to-date. This strategy ensures more efficient management of SharePoint systems, minimizing delays and boosting overall operational effectiveness.

 If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

SharePoint 2013 - Unable to read Web.Config file in Event receiver

Introduction:
Generally, we use web.config file’s app settings section to keep configurable and application wide settings that an application requires in order to perform the task properly. This helps in easy maintenance and deployment of the application, because we can easily update the settings and verify without build and deployment.

Now we read the key value pairs from web.config file as follow:
ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key]

I need to use these app settings in Item added Event receiver in SharePoint list. Though, the above code worked fine on local environment, but on production server, it gave exception.
"Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

In the Event receiver, the above code is unable to find and read the web.config app settings, you would've noticed that although code compiles and runs, this comes back null. Well, the very generic answer to why this is, is because the event handler isn't really running within the same context as a Web site that has direct access to the ConfigurationManager.

Approach/solution:
There is a simple solution for this issue, just change the approach of reading the web.config file.

Below is the method we have implemented to read the web.config file:
public static string GetAppSettingKeyValue(SPSite siteCollection, string key)
        {
            System.Configuration.Configuration config;
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(siteCollection.WebApplication.Name))
                throw new ApplicationException("Web application name is empty!");
            config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("/", siteCollection.WebApplication.Name);
            AppSettingsSection appSettings = config.AppSettings;
            if (appSettings == null)
                throw new ApplicationException("Web.config appSettings section cannot be found!");
            if (appSettings.Settings[key] == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(appSettings.Settings[key].Value))
                throw new ApplicationException("Key value cannot be read from settings of appSettings. Make sure this key and its value exist!");
            return appSettings.Settings[key].Value;
        }

And then we just have to call the above method from event receiver’s events with necessary parameters to read the settings as below:
GetAppSettingKeyValue(new SPSite(properties.SiteId), key);

Here, first parameter is SPSite object and the second parameter is a app settings key, for which we need to read value from web.config file.

Thus all we need to do is, just change the approach of reading web.config file and we are done! Now, we can successfully read the app settings configuration.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.