Sharepoint Item Level Permissions via List Settings in C#

A forum post made me aware of the possibility to set item level permissions for a sharepoint list in a configurative way, without the need of writing an event receiver. Just jump to your list and navigate to

[Ribbon Region] List Tools -> [Tab] List -> [Group] Settings -> [Button] List Settings

On the list settings page select

[Region] General Settings -> [Link] Advanced settings -> [Region] Item-Level Permissions

You should see something like this:

This is great because it enables me to do a lot of the stuff I have done with event revievers before, so it saves me a lot of code.

But of course I want to set these in code, for being able to deploy my development by menas of an wsp-file. Say I want to configure the list in a way that a user can only see and edit the items he created. I was browsing thorugh the properties of the SPList-object and found something that seems a little bit like a hack to me, but here is the way it goes:

SPList myList = GetMyList();
myList.ReadSecurity = 2;
myList.WriteSecurity = 2;
myList.Update();


Yeah, belive it or not, those two are integer fields. According to MSDN we can set the following values for ReadSecurity:

• 1 - All users have Read access to all items. 
• 2 - Users have Read access only to items that they create. 

For WriteSecurity the following values are allowed:

• 1 — All users can modify all items.
• 2 — Users can modify only items that they create.
• 4 — Users cannot modify any list item.

The programming model for this is really ugly, but it serves the need. This applies to Sharepoint 2010 where I tested it, and according to MSDN it is the same for shapreoint 2013.

Enjoy!