Posted on October 9, 2009 - by Rouslan Grabar

Move list item into a subfolder in the same list

Someone asked how to copy the list item into a subfolder on the same list. The code the guy provided that used SPListItem.CopyTo(url) did not work for him and was yelling the following:

Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.

The reason was the fact the guy used destination item property Url. This property is a relative Url, but the CopyTo method requires absolute URL.

Another caveat is that even if used properly, the method was throwing the following exception message:

Source item cannot be found.  Verify that the item exist and that you have permission to read it.

Considering the fact that we are moving item the way to overcome this is to use this approach – please see the Powershell snippet below:

#this is p o w e r s h e l l code
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
#returns the SPSite at the specified URL
function getSPSite ([String]$webUrl=$(throw 'Parameter -webUrl is missing!'))
{
   return New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("$webUrl");
}
$site = getSPSite($url) as [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite];
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb]$web = $site.OpenWeb("/website");
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPList]$list = $web.Lists["listname"];
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem]$srcItem  = $list.GetItemById(1);
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem]$destItem = $list.GetItemById(2);
[String]$srcUrl = $web.Url + "/" +$srcItem.Url;
#here we construct the destination URL for the item
[String]$destUrl = $web.Url + "/" +$destItem.Url + "/" + $srcItem.ID + "_.000";
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFile]$srcFile = $web.GetFile($srcUrl);
$srcFile.MoveTo($destUrl);