Clean up orphan bucket folders

Sitecore has a pretty cool stuff called Bucketing which lets you store and manage huge amount of content items in one single container. I guess you already know what I’m talking about so I will skip explaining how to work with bucket items.

This post will explain how an orphan bucket folder will be removed dynamically removed when a bucketable item is deleted from the Sitecore tree using a custom event handler.

First, we will need to define our new custom event who should be placed into the item:deleted. This is the event that is raised when an item has been deleted. The subscription of the event is in the following way:


<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <events>
      <event name="item:deleted">
        <handler type="Project.Website.Configuration.CleanupBucket, Project.Website" method="OnItemDeleted" />
      </event>
    </events>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Then we have to implement a class that will loop thought all the ancestors of the deleted item and will remove the bucket folders that are not having a bcuketable child item.


namespace Project.Website.Configuration
{
    public class CleanupBucket
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Called when [item deleted complete].
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="sender">The sender.</param>
        /// <param name="eventArgs">The <see cref="EventArgs"/> instance containing the event data.</param>
        protected virtual void OnItemDeleted(object sender, EventArgs eventArgs)
        {
            var sitecoreArgs = eventArgs as Sitecore.Events.SitecoreEventArgs;
            if (sitecoreArgs == null) return;
            var item = Sitecore.Events.Event.ExtractParameter(eventArgs, 0) as Item;
            if (item == null || item.IsABucket() || !item.IsItemBucketable()) return;

            var parentId = Sitecore.Events.Event.ExtractParameter(eventArgs, 1) != null ? Sitecore.Events.Event.ExtractParameter(eventArgs, 1).ToString() : null;
            var parentItem = !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(parentId) ? item.Database.GetItem(new ID(parentId)) : null;
            CleanupOrphanBucket(item, parentItem);
        }

        protected void CleanupOrphanBucket(Item item, Item currentParentItem = null)
        {
            Assert.IsNotNull(item, &quot;item&quot;);
            var parentItem = currentParentItem ?? item.Parent;
            if (parentItem == null || !parentItem.IsABucketFolder() || parentItem.Axes.GetDescendants().Any(child =&gt; !child.IsABucketFolder())) return;
            using (new Sitecore.SecurityModel.SecurityDisabler())
            {
                var parentAncestor = parentItem.Parent;
                parentItem.Delete();
                CleanupOrphanBucket(parentItem, parentAncestor);
            }
        }
    }
}

Finally, verify that your merged configuration has your class into the <event> configuration node. Consider including this event also for the remove event handler (item:deleted:remote)

inspiration