Get Associated Groups of a SharePoint Site (Owners, Members)

There will be cases where you want to know the associated Owner or a Member or a Visitor group of a specific SharePoint site. This will be very much needed if you want to,

assign permission
to get the owners from the Owner Group.
Or many many other use cases

This will be super helpful if you want to get the default groups when you get the Web properties. Especially when you are automating web provisioning along with the Permissions.

For doing that you can use the properties like associatedOwnerGroup, associatedMemberGroup, associatedVisitorGroup in REST API for getting the SP Web Properties REST API - https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/contososite/_api/web.

So the entire REST call with all the associated groups (associatedOwnerGroup, associatedMemberGroup, associatedVisitorGroup), your complete REST API endpoint would look something like below

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/contososite/_api/web?$expand=AssociatedOwnerGroup,AssociatedMemberGroup,AssociatedVisitorGroup

The above REST call would fetch the associated group information of a particular SharePoint Web. Once you execute the API, you will get the result something like below.

{
    "AssociatedMemberGroup": {
        "Id": 5,
        "IsHiddenInUI": false,
        "LoginName": "Contoso Site Members",
        "Title": "Contoso Site Members",
        "PrincipalType": 8,
        "AllowMembersEditMembership": true,
        "AllowRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "AutoAcceptRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "Description": null,
        "OnlyAllowMembersViewMembership": false,
        "OwnerTitle": "Contoso Site Owners",
        "RequestToJoinLeaveEmailSetting": ""
    },
    "AssociatedOwnerGroup": {
        "Id": 3,
        "IsHiddenInUI": false,
        "LoginName": "Contoso Site Owners",
        "Title": "Contoso Site Owners",
        "PrincipalType": 8,
        "AllowMembersEditMembership": false,
        "AllowRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "AutoAcceptRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "Description": null,
        "OnlyAllowMembersViewMembership": false,
        "OwnerTitle": "Contoso Site Owners",
        "RequestToJoinLeaveEmailSetting": ""
    },
    "AssociatedVisitorGroup": {
        "Id": 4,
        "IsHiddenInUI": false,
        "LoginName": "Contoso Site Visitors",
        "Title": "Contoso Site Visitors",
        "PrincipalType": 8,
        "AllowMembersEditMembership": false,
        "AllowRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "AutoAcceptRequestToJoinLeave": false,
        "Description": null,
        "OnlyAllowMembersViewMembership": false,
        "OwnerTitle": "Contoso Site Owners",
        "RequestToJoinLeaveEmailSetting": ""
    }
}

This also would be super handy if you want to have a Power Automate which will assign users to default SharePoint Owner or Member of Visitor Group.

Get Associated Groups in scripts for automation

If you want to have the same functionality for writing automated scripts, CLI for Microsoft 365 has a command called m365 spo web get. If you execute m365 spo web get with the option, --withGroups you will get the complete Web Properties along with the associated groups (associatedOwnerGroup, associatedMemberGroup, associatedVisitorGroup). Supercool isn’t it.

Photo by Jonny Rothwell on Unsplash