Set Sharepoint list folder permissions

How-To: Set folder permissions using a SPD workflow

This tutorial is going to be rather short since the procedure is the same as setting item permissions.

As you may know using item level permission security is not very performant, especially when having many items in one list. To raise the performance, folder level security is recommended.

Basically all this is about is placing items which shall have the same permissions into one folder having exactly these permissions set to it. The items inside the folder are automatically inheriting the folder permissions and the list is sped up. :-)


To set folder permissions in a SPD workflow, you just have to follow these steps:

1. Inside a SPD workflow, choose the "Replace Item Permission" activity. If the activity is not present you might have to use an impersonation step.
2. Create a lookup which returns the folder (Best practice here: Set the permissions after creating the folder which returns the ID of the folder)
3. Set up your desired permissions.

Now the folder gets his permissions assigned automatically. All items inside the folder will inherit these permissions.

Please note: Always consider using groups for permissions. Assigning users directly is definitely not a good practice.