CMS: support for bulk delete operation for cms entry

[Ashu96]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Lifecycle events are neat for building custom business logic on top of headless CMS. While working with a model with a ref field, I encountered a use case where, I needed to delete all those entries that are linked via the ref field.

In order to do so, I had to write the code, which paginate through all those entries and delete them one by one. For example:

/**
 * Paginate through change requests.
 */
while (meta.hasMoreItems) {
    /**
     * Get all change requests.
     */
    try {
        [changeRequests, meta] = await apw.changeRequest.list({
            where: {
                step: slug
            },
            after: meta.cursor
        });
    } catch (e) {
        meta.hasMoreItems = false;
    }

    /**
     * Delete change requests one by one.
     */
    for (const changeRequest of changeRequests) {
        await apw.changeRequest.delete(changeRequest.id);
    }
}

---

It would be a big help, if we have a bulkDelete operation in CMS which delete bunch of entries at once.

We can also try extending this functionality for other operations like create and update if possible.

Describe the solution you'd like.

No response

Describe alternatives you've considered.

No response

[brunozoric]

@Ashu96 let's say we introduce deleteAll() method in the crud. Does it just iterate over entries and calls delete() method internally which, as consequence, calls beforeDelete and afterDelete on each entry, or we introduce beforeDeleteAll and afterDeleteAll?

[Ashu96]

@brunozoric

The implementation should still have those beforeDelete and afterDelete lifecycle events because it will keep things consistent. Also, in my use-case other business logic depends on those events.

In regards to new beforeDeleteAll and afterDeleteAll, I'm in favour of those too even though I don't have an exact use-case for them.

[larissa-n]

100% agreed, it would be great to have a bulk delete entries action.

It would be neat to have in the UI as well. Currently, you cannot delete a content model if it still has any entries. Unfortunately, if you have hundreds of entries in that content model, you would spend an awfully long time going through all of them one by one. Checkboxes to delete all or select entries at once (kind of like in many other CMS) would be a game changer.

[webiny-bot]

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[larissa-n]

Any news on this? Current workaround is to delete rows from DynamoDB in AWS ...

Thanks!