How to: Add Complex Rules to an Audience Using AND, OR, ( and ) Operators

The user interface provides you with only two options for defining rules for audiences: include users that satisfy all rules, or include users that satisfy any rules. Although this might be enough for some situations, most often you will need to include users that satisfy complex rules. Complex rules use both AND and OR operators, and they may also use parentheses ( ) to group the rules to give them a different meaning.

In cases in which you need to create complex rules, you can use the Audience object model. The object model supports up to a maximum of three levels of nesting of parentheses.

The following code example adds complex rules for an audience called "John and Joe Connection". This example uses AND, OR, and ( and ) operators to combine multiple rules and to group rules.

Replace servername and other strings with actual values before running the code example. Also add the following references in your Microsoft Visual Studio project:

• Microsoft.Office.Server

• Microsoft.SharePoint

• System.Web

Example

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;
using Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.Office.Server;
using System.Web;
using System.Collections;

namespace AudienceConsoleApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                using (SPSite site = new SPSite("https://servername"))
                {
                    ServerContext context = ServerContext.GetContext(site);
                    AudienceManager AudMgr = new AudienceManager(context);

                    AudienceCollection ac = AudMgr.Audiences;
                    Audience a = null;
                    bool ruleListNotEmpty = false;

                    try
                    {
                        a = AudMgr.Audiences["John and Joe Connection"];
                    }
                    catch (AudienceArgumentException ex)
                    {
                        //your exception handling code here
                    }

                    ArrayList aRules = a.AudienceRules;
                    if (aRules == null)
                    {
                        aRules = new ArrayList();
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        ruleListNotEmpty = true;
                    }


                    try
                    {
                        //if the rule is not emply, start with a group operator 'AND' to append
                        if (ruleListNotEmpty)
                        {
                            aRules.Add(new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null));
                        }

                        AudienceRuleComponent r0 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
                        aRules.Add(r0);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r1 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "John");
                        aRules.Add(r1);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r2 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
                        aRules.Add(r2);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r3 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "example.com");
                        aRules.Add(r3);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r4 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
                        aRules.Add(r4);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r5 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "OR", null);
                        aRules.Add(r5);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r6 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
                        aRules.Add(r6);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r7 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "Joe");
                        aRules.Add(r7);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r8 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
                        aRules.Add(r8);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r9 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "someexample.com");
                        aRules.Add(r9);

                        AudienceRuleComponent r10 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
                        aRules.Add(r10);
                        a.AudienceRules = aRules;
                        a.Commit();
                    }
                    catch (AudienceException e)
                    {
                        //Your exception handling code here
                    }
                }
            }

            catch (Exception exception)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(exception.ToString());
                Console.Read();
            }

        }

    }
}

See Also

Other Resources

Targeting Content Using Audiences