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My customer has a Page Library with versioning enabled and no versions limit.

There is pages with more than 300.000 versions.

I need to delete all old versions, but keep safe the 5 newer versions.

We have a On-Premises solution. My first try was calling SPFile.Versions.DeleteAll() with no success after 1 day running it in just one file.

My next try was to limit library versions count to 5 and then running SPFile.Item.SystemUpdate() having the same result as above.

And then, by last, I created a TestPage.aspx file with some versions. I believed that my rescue would be the SPWeb.ProcessBatchData method and so confident as I could be, I wrote...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<ows:Batch OnError="Continue">
    <Method ID="0,Delete">
      <SetList Scope="Request">xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx</SetList>
      <SetVar Name="Cmd"> Delete </SetVar>
      <SetVar Name="ID"> 21 </SetVar>
      <SetVar Name="owshiddenversion"> 2 </SetVar> 
      <SetVar Name="owsfileref"> http://customer/Pages/TestPage.aspx </SetVar>
    </Method>
</ows:Batch>

And SPWeb.ProcessBatchData method has deleted TestPage.aspx and all its versions.

What could I do to delete several versions of several files in several lists without taking more than one day per file or loosing all data?

I think SPWeb.ProcessBatchData is the answer, but I missing something here.

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1 Answer 1

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If it is SharePoint 2013, you can trim the versions using JavaScript. Below is the code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("AddTrimmerIcon");
            function AddTrimmerIcon() {
                $(".ms-qcb-root ul li:nth-child(4)").each(function() {
                    $(this).first().before('<li class="ms-qcb-item">' +
                    '<button class="ms-qcb-button ms-qcb-buttons-alignmentfix
                    js-listview-qcbUploadButton js-callout-body js-qcb-button ms-qcb-glyph"
                    type="button"' +
                    'title="Select file and trim versions of the file" role="button"
                    accesskey="t" onclick="TrimDocument()"><span class="ms-qcb-glyph
                    ms-listview-glyph-withmargin ms-listview-sync-glyph
                    ms-core-form-heading"><img style="height:20px;width:25px;" src="' +
                    _spPageContextInfo.webServerRelativeUrl +
                    '/SiteAssets/VersionTrimmer/vtrimmer.png"/></span><spancb-glyph
                    ">Trim</span></button></li>')
                });
            }
            function TrimDocument() {
                SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', Trim);
            }
            function Trim() {
                var count = SP.ListOperation.Selection.getSelectedItems(ctx).length;
                if (count == 0) {
                    alert("Please select an item from the list");
                    return false;
                }
                if (count > 1) {
                    alert("Please select only one file");
                    return false;
                }
                SP.UI.ModalDialog.showWaitScreenWithNoClose('Trimming Versions', 'Please wait while
                the versions of the file are being deleted');
                var title = ctx.ListTitle;
                var items = SP.ListOperation.Selection.getSelectedItems(ctx);
                //get file versions
                $.ajax({
                    url: _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl + "/_api/web/lists/getByTitle('" + title
                    + "')/items(" + items[0].id + ")/File/Versions",
                    method: "GET",
                    headers: {
                        "Accept": "application/json; odata=verbose"
                    },
                    success: function(data) {
                        var totalversions = data.d.results.length;
                        $.each(data.d.results, function(index, item) {
                            var count = index;
                            $.ajax({
                                url: _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
                                "/_api/web/lists/getByTitle('" + title + "')/items(" + items[0].id
                                + ")/File/Versions('" + item.ID + "')",
                                type: "POST",
                                contentType: "application/json;odata=verbose",
                                headers: {
                                    "Accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
                                    "X-RequestDigest": $("#__REQUESTDIGEST").val(),
                                    "X-HTTP-Method": "DELETE",
                                    "IF-MATCH": "*"
                                },
                                success: function(data) {
                                    if (totalversions == (count + 1)) {
                                        SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.c
                                        ancel);
                                    }
                                },
                                error: function(data) {
                                    SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel);
                                }
                            });
                        });
                    },
                    error: function(data) {
                        SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel);
                    }
                });
            }
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
</html>

https://www.dsouzajoel.com/2015/12/07/version-history-trimmer/

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  • I cant use the rest query /_api/Web/Lists/getByTitle(TITLE)/items(ID)/File/Versions because 300.000 versions is A LOT versions. My query not even returns... In addition, doing an POST for each version is insane. To delete this massive collection, only SSOM could.
    – Guilherme Matheus Costa
    Jan 9, 2017 at 13:17

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