Mass Delete Through Serialization

Item Buckets in Sitecore 7 are great, but I've run into a problem with them. Deleting mass quantities of data through the UI can be slow. I have one bucket that has ~27k records of data underneath it that I want to clean out and re-import. Any time I try to delete this folder and its children, the site times out again and again.

I tried writing a quick method call to run the delete. I added a button that I could click from the Content Editor, which would make an async call to a method that deleted all the children of the folder. This worked with no time-out, but it took a very long time to loop through all the children and delete everything.

Then I was introduced to a trick using the Serialization functionality inherent in Sitecore.

Sitecore has the ability to serialize content items into text files. This is essentially what TDS is doing behind the scenes. Serializing the content items and managing the created files for you. These Serialization options can be found in the Developer ribbon.

You can also Revert Tree on a content item, which reads the serialized text files and builds the content item and its children accordingly. This is where the trick comes in.





For our example we have a content item called "Courses". The children of this item represent the ~27k pieces of Course data that I have imported and want to delete.






 Check that the content item has been serialized. You can check this by going to the path C:\inetpub\wwwroot\CCBC\Data\serialization\master\sitecore\content\Data\CCBC, and looking for the "Courses" folder and "Courses.item" serialized file. If it hasn't been serialized, then go back to the content item and click the "Serialize Item" button in the Developer ribbon.

If the entire tree has been serialized, you can go into the Courses folder and see more folders and files that represent the structure that Item Buckets build when items are added to them.

 

Go into the Courses folder and delete everything in there. You want this folder to be empty.

Now go back to the Courses item in the Content Editor. Click on "Revert Tree" in the Developer tab. You'll get a dialog box that might last a few minutes while it does its thing.

Once it's done, refresh the Courses folder and you'll see that all of its children are gone!

In the end, this Serialization method took maybe 3-4 minutes to delete ~27k records. Doing it programmatically was taking 15-30+ minutes (not to mention code time, deploying, etc.). Deleting through the UI just wasn't happening at all.

There is one small issue with this however. You'll notice that if you do a search on the Item Buckets folder, it will still return a result count. No actual items get returned, but Sitecore still *thinks* it has returned all the items that used to exist.

This will remain until you do a full index rebuild. Just doing a "Re-Index Tree" isn't enough for this one. This is an issue known by Sitecore, the "Re-Index Tree" functionality only deals with new or updated records. It won't clear deleted items from the index.