SiteStatus = 4 means site already exists in the given tenant with given url

[anisiaalexandra]

Hi,

I am writting this in the hope that people having the same issue as me might read it and would save them some trouble.
We have created an index based provisioning engine. At one point in time the engine would refuse to create sites, but not give any errors whatso ever.
After some testing we found out that when using the creation endpoint we would receive as answer the following json and no error:
"SiteId": "",
"SiteStatus": 4,
"SiteUrl": ""
Status 4 is missing from the documentation we can find here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/apis/site-creation-rest, but it actually means your site already exists in the given tenant.
Hope Microsoft can update with the full list of SiteStatus to give us a bit more error handling possibilies.

Regards,
Anisia Pop

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• ID: 26b24cbb-892e-8e39-8a24-ad5997cae065
• Version Independent ID: b643463a-91b8-3230-e314-6522f35e5bd9
• Content: Create Modern SharePoint Sites using REST
• Content Source: docs/apis/site-creation-rest.md
• Product: sharepoint
• GitHub Login: @VesaJuvonen
• Microsoft Alias: vesaj

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[breakpoint7]

Another observation -- it appears that if you make this create call as a Global Admin and it already exists, it will happily return success (200) and return the SiteStatus as 2 along with a valid SiteId and SiteUrl .
If you are simply a SharePoint Administrator, it will return success (200) but with a SiteStatus of 4 and leave the SiteId and SiteUrl blank.
So it appears you can't rely on the success of the call alone to determine if the response will provide accurate results.

[veronicageek]

@breakpoint7 @VesaJuvonen

I don't know if things have changed since then and I agree that the create call return the SiteStatus of 2 along with the same SiteId and SiteUrl.

In my case I'm trying to get a SiteStatus of 4 (for demo purposes) and whether I'm a GA or just SP Admin, I still get a SiteStatus of 2 and the other fields are not blank 🤔

If anyone knows how to "provoke" a SiteStatus of 4, I'm all ears...

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