How can I quickly Delete the contents of a SharePoint List View

Question

I've got a SharePoint with a view called Retention that has around half a million entries, I want to delete the entries in the view from SharePoint as they are no longer required but I've not been able to find a quick way of doing this using PowerShell.

I've found this script and though it works it is incredibly slow, almost an hour to delete 3000 items;

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

Function Cleardown
{
     #Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell   

    # Get SharePoint list
    $web = Get-SPWeb "SP Web Address"
    $list = $web.Lists["List Name"]
    $view = $list.Views["View Name"]
    $items = $list.GetItems($view)
    $items.count

    # Loop through view
    for ($i=$items.count-1; $i -ge 0; $i--)
    { 
       $item = $items[$i]; 
       $item.Recycle(); 
       Write-host -NoNewLine "$i        `r"
    }
    $Web = ""
}

For ($loop=1; $loop -le 1; $loop++) #967
{

    write-host "Pass " $loop
    Cleardown  
}

Any suggestions for a way of doing this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You should consider using batches or scriptBlock in PowerShell to move forward faster. You should expect 7-10 times faster item deletion with that.

I would suggest to use PNP PowerShell for that. See script example bellow using batches:

#Parameters
$SiteURL="https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/siteABC"
$ListName="ListName"
$ViewName= "ViewName"
 
#Connect to the Site        
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Interactive 

#Get List
$List =  Get-PnPList -Identity $ListName 
#Get List View
$ListView  = Get-PnPView -List $ListName -Identity $ViewName -Includes ListViewXml
 

#Get List Items from the view
$listItems = Get-PnPListItem -List Tasks -Query $ListView.ListViewXml
#Create Batch
$batch = New-PnPBatch 
$listItems | Foreach-Object { Remove-PnPListItem -List $list -Identity $_ -Batch $batch } 
Invoke-PnPBatch -Batch $batch