Programatically identifing feature for activation

Question

I have a requirement where a custom action is only added to the root site of the site collection. So planning to add two features one Site scoped and the other Web scoped. In the event receiver of a Site scoped feature, I'm activating the Web scope feature.

For this i can use

web.Features.Add(webFeatureId);

How can I find the web level features feature id programmatically ?

Answer 1

Well. It really depends on which feature you have to activate.

The id of a feature does not change during its life. This means that if you can find out the id you will be sure it stays the same, regardless of the specific SharePoint farm instance. That said, you can "hardcode" your ID in a support class, much like SharePoint does with fields id in the SPBuiltInFields class.

If for any reason you can't know the feature ID beforehand you will need some other way to identify the feature - for example the display name. With that info you can use the FeatureDefinitions property of the SPWeb object to browse the installed 'Web' level features, search the one you need and add it to the Features collection to activate it as required.