SharePoint site groups REST API reference [CRUD]

A Brief Introduction

SharePoint is a great collaboration tool from Microsoft. SharePoint can be used as a website and also as a document storage platform. Moreover, SharePoint has very efficient permission management system. Both SharePoint site groups and O365 groups can be used for managing permissions in SharePoint. And more importantly, these SharePoint group permissions can be managed through SharePoint REST API or PowerShell. In this document I have shared the necessary information related to SharePoint site groups REST API resource.

Application of SharePoint site group REST API

Below are some of the possible tasks you can do using SharePoint site groups rest API.

Create a site group
Update group Properties
Get group details
Get all site groups details
Get users list from a group
Add user to a group
Remove a user from a group

In this post I have shared implementation examples for all the above SharePoint site group REST API endpoints. Check them below

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#. Pre-requisite

Below are the prerequisites to work with SharePoint site group REST API

A SharePoint site
An application to call the SharePoint REST API endpoints. I have shown using POSTMAN, you are free to use Power Automate or Visual Studio Code.
*** You will need SharePoint API AccessToken to call REST API endpoints. To learn how to generate an accesstoken for SharePoint REST API, check this document ***
https://newbietechie.com/how-to-generate-api-access-token-for-sharepoint-postman/

#A little introduction

A SharePoint site group is a resource/object which you can add/use in SharePoint to manage permissions. SP site groups allows to manage permission more efficiently and easily. A basic difference between SharePoint site group and O365 group is that, SharePoint groups do not have any email address associated with them. And thus you can’t send email to those groups.

SharePoint site group have many properties, some of them can be read/updated using REST API endpoints. Below are some basic properties which you should be aware of (important ones are in bold).

Property	Type	Read/Write	Returned with resource	Description
AllowMembersEditMembership	Boolean	RW	Yes	Gets or sets a value that indicates whether the group members can edit membership in the group.
AllowRequestToJoinLeave	Boolean	RW	Yes	Gets or sets a value that indicates whether to allow users to request membership in the group and request to leave the group.
AutoAcceptRequestToJoinLeave	Boolean	RW	No	Gets or sets a value that indicates whether the request to join or leave the group can be accepted automatically.
CanCurrentUserEditMembership	Boolean	R	No	Gets a value that indicates whether the current user can edit the membership of the group.
CanCurrentUserManageGroup	Boolean	R	No	Gets a value that indicates whether the current user can manage the group.
CanCurrentUserViewMembership	Boolean	R	No	Gets a value that indicates whether the current user can view the membership of the group.
Description	String	RW	Yes	Gets or sets the description of the group.
Id	Int32	R	Yes	Gets a value that specifies the member identifier for the user or group.
LoginName	String	R	Yes	Gets the name of the group.
OnlyAllowMembersViewMembership	Boolean	RW	Yes	Gets or sets a value that indicates whether only group members are allowed to view the membership of the group.
OwnerTitle	String	R	Yes	Gets the name for the owner of this group.
PrincipalType	Int32	R	Yes	Gets a value containing the type of the principal. Represents a bitwise SP.PrincipalType value: None = 0; User = 1; DistributionList = 2; SecurityGroup = 4; SharePointGroup = 8; All = 15.
Title	String	RW	Yes	Gets or sets a value that specifies the name of the principal.
Users	SP.UserCollection	R	No	Gets a collection of user objects that represents all of the users in the group.

SharePoint Site group properties

#. Implementation

#Ex 1: Get a SharePoint site group details [REST API]

The Uri for getting site groups details is
http://<your site>/_api/web/sitegroups

The sitegroups resource Uri above, returns all site groups details for a particular SharePoint site. However if you need to get only one particular group then you can use either filter query or the sitegroups resource methods. Two of the methods for getting a particular group details are

GetById – Gets a group detail by Id
GetByName – Gets group detail by Name

#Ex 1.1: GetById – SharePoint site groups method [REST API]

To get a group by id, you need to know the id. There are two ways to know the id of a group, they are

Manually – Navigate to people & group settings for a particular site. Then open any group of your choice and the id of the group will be mentioned at the end of the URL of that particular page.

Programmatically – There are many ways to do it, including but not limited to using the sitegroups Uri and then getting the id.

Anyways, once you have the id, you can call the following REST API endpoint using any method of your choice to get site group details. Below is one example.
Below example is shown using POSTMAN web application. If you are not sure how to generate an access token to call the API, please check this document.

Successful REST API call from POSTMAN for site group details — Particular site group resource

To get group details using getbyname method, just pass the group name as a parameter. An example is as follows,
_api/web/sitegroups/getbyname(‘group name’)

That’s all for getting a particular group detail.

#Ex 2: Get All users of group

The getById method only returns the details about the group but does not return the user details. If you need to know the user details then call the users method of the group as below.
As you can see, the return result is an array of user details. This array contains all user details added in that particular group.
Remember the LoginName parameter, this parameter will be used later to add/remove users to/from the group.

site group user details using SharePoint REST API

#Ex 3: Remove/Delete a Group

To delete a SharePoint group you can use any of the following REST API methods, removeById() or removeByLoginName(). An example is below

remove SharePoint group from site using REST API

#Ex 4: Create a group using REST API

To create a group you need to send a POST request to the sitegroups resource of the site with the following body as parameter. You can include other parameters from the above table as well. Just make sure that you are not trying to modify a read-only parameter.

    { 
	'__metadata':{
            'type': 'SP.Group' 
	 }, 
	    'Title':'New Group' 
    }

The above body contains the minimum information you must to pass to create a group. An example request is below

Site group creation request using SharePoint REST API

#Ex 5: Add user to a SharePoint group

To add a user to a group you need to send a POST request with the follow body

{ 
	'__metadata': 
{ 'type': 'SP.User' }, 
	'LoginName':<Proper Login name format> 
}

The login name needs to be in a specific format, depending upon your SharePoint hosting and authentication method. If you see in the previous example #2, the login name parameter is visible. As of now there are three types of LoginName parameter type, they are as below.

SharePoint environment	Example login name format
SharePoint Online, or SharePoint 2013 on-premises using forms	i:0#.f\|membership\|user@domain.com
SharePoint 2013 on-premises using Windows claims	i:0#.w\|domain\user
SharePoint 2013 on-premises using SAML claims	i:05:t\|adfs with roles\|user@domain.com

As I am using SharePoint Online, the login name is formatted in the first format type. Now with the above reference use the correct login name format as per your environment and call the REST API endpoint. See the below example as a reference

Add user to a group using SharePoint REST API — Upon successful execution of the API call, you will see 201 HTTP response code

If you are receiving error, i.e. __metadata does not exist, check this post
https://newbietechie.com/the-property-__metadata-does-not-exist-on-type-sp-data/

#Ex 6: Get User using Email or LoginName

One of the common requirements is to check if a user exists in a site or not. With the help of SharePoint REST API endpoints, this can be done very easily. To get user from SharePoint resource you can use the GetByEmail or LoginName endpoint. See the below examples

SharePoint REST API To Get User By Email — Returned result if user exists

Now if the API is called but the user does not exist in the group, then below response will be received (i.e. 404 not found).

User not found in group SharePoint site group REST API reference

As you can see, it returned 404 not found response.

That’s all I have for this document and I hope you are now familiar with SharePoint group REST API resource. If you found this post helpful please share it with others and make sure to support the writer using any of the below options. Thank you!

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