Beau Cameron

Site designs provide the ability for the provisioning of assets during the site creation process in Modern SharePoint. The site design documentation is fairly robust and includes commands to interact with site designs using PowerShell and REST. Recently, there have been updates to Site Designs and the documentation is still playing catch up.

One of the latest releases includes the ability to invoke more than 30 actions in a site script. I’ve talked about this extensively in my previous post. This post includes the methods for executing a site design using PowerShell. Today, we’ll talk about the options of using REST.

ApplySiteDesign (old way!)

ApplySiteDesign was the original REST endpoint for applying a site design to an existing site collection. This would allow you create a POST request to the ApplySiteDesign endpoint and pass in the SiteDesignId and the WebUrl to the body.

This invocation is limited to the 30 actions in a site script.

Request

fetch("https://testsite.sharepoint.com/sites/test/_api/Microsoft.Sharepoint.Utilities.WebTemplateExtensions.SiteScriptUtility.ApplySiteDesign", {
    "credentials": "include",
    "headers": {
        "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
        "content-type": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "x-requestdigest": "YourXRequestDigest"
    },
    "referrer": "https://testsite.sharepoint.com/sites/test",
    "referrerPolicy": "no-referrer-when-downgrade",
    "body": "{\"siteDesignId\":\"38ef12db-e8b8-4716-96d9-7556c61bf98b\",\"webUrl\":\"https://testsite.sharepoint.com/sites/test\"}",
    "method": "POST",
    "mode": "cors"
});

AddSiteDesignTaskToCurrentWeb  (new way!)

AddSiteDesignTaskToCurrentWeb is the new REST endpoint for site designs, which provides the ability to overcome the 30 action limit. This new endpoint now allows for 300 actions or 100k characters in a site script (or cumulative across all site scripts in a given Site Design). The only parameters required to execute a site design task is to pass in the site design using the siteDesignId property.

Request

fetch("https://testsite.sharepoint.com/sites/test/_api/Microsoft.Sharepoint.Utilities.WebTemplateExtensions.SiteScriptUtility.AddSiteDesignTaskToCurrentWeb", {
    "credentials": "include",
    "headers": {
        "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
        "content-type": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "x-requestdigest": "YourXRequestDigest"
    },
    "referrer": "https://testsite.sharepoint.com/sites/test",
    "referrerPolicy": "no-referrer-when-downgrade",
    "body": "{\"siteDesignId\":\"38ef12db-e8b8-4716-96d9-7556c61bf98b\"}",
    "method": "POST",
    "mode": "cors"
});

Response

{
    "d": {
        "AddSiteDesignTaskToCurrentWeb": {
            "__metadata": {
                "type": "Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.WebTemplateExtensions.SiteDesignTask"
            },
            "ID": "b86f5a1c-c153-4ff9-b17f-c9c123ee9249",
            "LogonName": "i:0#.f|membership|beau@cameronsoft.onmicrosoft.com",
            "SiteDesignID": "38ef12db-e8b8-4716-96d9-7556c61bf98b",
            "SiteID": "2636e586-47e2-4644-9b01-88f73b397e9e",
            "WebID": "7ccf233e-97e6-46bc-9101-3607e1b221ba"
        }
    }
}

If you’d like to see which site designs have been applied to this site or want to see the success of each action within this invocation, you can follow this post which shows examples using REST and PowerShell.

Have really long site scripts?

What happens if you have site scripts that are over 300 actions, and the current framework will not support it? A tip  is to break the site scripts out into multiple site designs and call them via flow. Check out Reza Dorrani’s blog showing how to do this.