Recently I had a request from a customer to find which SharePoint 2010 / 2013 lists are using InfoPath forms for their data entry (also known as enterprise forms for a SharePoint list).  In this post I will show you a PowerShell script to determine if a SharePoint list is using InfoPath forms.

Problem

  As you may have heard, InfoPath as a product will not be receiving any future releases (see InfoPath roadmap update blog post).  Being able to find SharePoint lists using InfoPath forms may be useful to you now.

Solution

   Special thanks goes out to Joe Rodgers (fellow PFE at Microsoft) who helped me narrow down the specific properties to look at.  The property that we want is not at the base of the SPList properties nor on the SPList.Forms properties like I had hoped.  Instead you will need to dig a few levels down.  I found the property at SPList.ContentTypes[0].ResourceFolder.Properties[“_ipfs_infopathenabled”].  If this setting is true then your list is using InfoPath forms for data entry.  If it is false then it is using out of the box SharePoint forms.

Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell 
$webURL = <Your Site URL> 
$documentLibraryName = <name of document library> 

$web = Get-SPWeb 
$list = $web.Lists[“$documentLibraryName”] 
$isUsingInfoPath = $list.ContentTypes[0].ResourceFolder.Properties[“_ipfs_infopathenabled”] 
Write-Output $isUsingInfoPath 

Conclusion

   This script will determine if a single SharePoint list is using InfoPath forms or not.  You could easily expand this to work with multiple lists or sites (similar to my PowerShell Script to Determine Number of Files in SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Document Libraries).  Feel free to adapt the above snippet in this post to your needs but please attribute rights if you republish.

      -Frog Out

   I had a customer request recently to limit the which site templates were available to end users to create subsites.  Below is a short PowerShell script to do just that.

Problem

   If you are using a Publishing Site you can restrict the available site templates by going to Site Settings –> Look & Feel and clicking on Page Layouts and Site Templates (see following screenshot).  If you are not on a Publishing Site then there is not an easy (supported) way to accomplish this through out of the box means.

Solution

   The SPWeb class has methods GetAvailableWebTemplates and SetAvailableWebTemplates that can be used in conjunction with each other to get the current list of templates and then filter down to only the desired templates.  The filtered down results can then be set and updated on the SPWeb.  A version of this script can be downloaded from the TechNet Script Repository: Limit available web templates for a SharePoint site.

Note:  Be sure to modify the “<URL of site>” to your site’s URL and also change which templates to keep (line 2).

# array of template names (not titles) to keep 
$templateNamesToKeep = “STS#0”,“PROJECTSITE#0”,“BLOG#0” 

Start-SPAssignment -Global 
$web = Get-SPWeb <URL of site> 
# get the existing web templates from the site that will be filtered down 
# 1033 is the locale id for English US (en-us), be sure to change to your locale 
$existingWebTemplates = $web.GetAvailableWebTemplates(1033) 
$newWebTemplates = New-Object “System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWebTemplate]” 
# filter existing web templates and only keep if in the list of template names to keep 
$newWebTemplates = $existingWebTemplates | Where-Object {$_.name -in $templateNamesToKeep} 
$web.SetAvailableWebTemplates($newWebTemplates, 1033) 
$web.Update() 
Stop-SPAssignment -Global 

   Before you run the script you will see the original list of available web templates when creating a subsite.

   After you run the script you will now see only the templates which you listed in the templates to keep.

   If you need to reset the list of available web templates you can execute the AllowAllWebTemplates method on the SPWeb object.

Conclusion

   I had run across a few other samples for limiting web templates that involved modifying out of the box SharePoint files (changes which may be overwritten by future updates or patches, and thus not recommended).  This process of using the SetAvailableWebTemplates() method appears to be a bit more safe and supported.

      -Frog Out

   Quick blog post here to let you know that I wrote a guest blog post for Ed Wilson (The Microsoft Scripting Guy) over on the Hey Scripting Guy blog.  The post is titled “Weekend Scripter: Using PowerShell to Replace STSADM” and covers some research I did into replacing the functionality of the “STSADM –o enumallwebs” command with PowerShell.  Feel free to give it a read and let me know if you have any feedback or comments.   Have a great end of this 2013 year.

      -Frog Out

Links

Weekend Scripter: Using PowerShell to Replace STSADM

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2013/12/29/weekend-scripter-using-powershell-to-replace-stsadm.aspx