SharePoint - Reading values from items in a list

Extracting a value from a list item in a SharePoint site is frequently necessary, and it comes with a slight twist that some programmers may not be expecting.

So, this is an example of a method that works well for most purposes. First, lets identify the site that holds our SharePoint list...

Dim site As SPSite = SPContext.Current.Site
Dim url As String = SPContext.Current.Site.Url
Dim spWebSite As SPWeb = Site.OpenWeb("/")
Dim myList As Microsoft.SharePoint.SPList

Next, lets identify the list that we want to read from, and create a list item collection to hold it in memory.

myList = spWebSite.Lists("Employee Information")
Dim myItemCollection As SPListItemCollection
myItemCollection = myList.Items

Now, lets instantiate a lookup so that we can use it to pull the value from our specified list item.

Dim xValLookup As SPFieldLookupValue

Lets also create an arraylist to hold the values we extract. In this example, I created an arraylist to hold the values, and an arraylist to hold all the list items. On each loop, we will create a new instance of xTransaction, add items to it, then add xTransaction to our instance of transactionArry. At the end, we will have an arrylist with several arraylists in it.

Dim transactionArray As ArrayList = New ArrayList
Dim xTransaction As ArrayList

Now lets loop once for each item in the SharePoint list, and use the .LookupValue method to get to the info we need.

For Each xItem As SPListItem In myItemCollection
            xTransaction = New ArrayList
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Employee").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue)
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Transaction Type").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue)
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Transaction Time").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue)
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Time Zone").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue)
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Corrected Time").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue)
            xValLookup = New SPFieldLookupValue(xItem("Correction Remarks").ToString)
            xTransaction.Add(xValLookup.LookupValue) 
            transactionArray.Add(xTransaction)           
        Next

Now we can use the arraylist with the extracted values for whatever we need. Note that in the example, I specified the colum names to get the values from, but you can also specify a numeric value as the index if that works better for your objective. Hope this helps!