Purging using the Purge Tool interface

About this task

To use the Purge Tool to delete items, you must have system administration rights or have access to the Publications you want to Purge and read/delete permissions for the organizational items (Folders, Structure Groups) from which you want to Purge versions of items.

To delete Workflow process histories or publishing transactions, you must have system administration permissions.

Procedure

  1. Run PurgeTool.exe on the machine where the Content Manager is installed. The location of this tool is in the bin\ subdirectory of the SDL Tridion installation root, which defaults to C:\Program Files\Tridion\.
  2. In the Logging area, fill in the following fields:
    • In the Log Directory field, do one of the following:

      • Specify a Log File.
      • If you do not specify a Log File, the default folder is used. This folder is named Logs and is located in the same location as the Purge Tool directory.
    • In the Log file prefix field, specify the filename prefix. If you do not specify a prefix, the default file name is Purge_.

      The current date and time are added to the filename prefix in a predefined format (yyyymmdd-hhmmss). For example, “purge_20090320-120300.log” indicates that the log file was created on March 20th, 2009 at 12:03.

  3. To delete versions of Content Manager items, perform the following steps: first, select the Delete versions check box.
  4. Next, do one of the following:
    • To delete versions based on the number of versions you want to keep, select the Number of versions to keep option, and specify the number of the most recent versions that you want to keep.

      For example, if you want to keep the last 5 versions, enter the value 5.

    • To delete versions before a specific date, select the Keep versions modified after option and enter the date after which all versions are kept. Versions created before the specified date are purged.

      For example, if you enter 20-Mar-2002 or 20/3/2003, all versions created before this date are purged. Both "-" and "/" can be used as separators and the month field can be either text or numeric.

    • To keep versions that were created during a specified number of days prior to today, select Keep versions within, and enter the number of days before which all versions are deleted.

      For example, if you want to purge all versions created before five days ago, enter the value 5.

  5. The selection pane displays the structure of Content Manager Publications. Next, in this pane, select the Publications, Folders, and Structure Groups from which you want to purge items.

    Before you select the Publications, Folders and Structure Groups from which you want to purge items, if you want to select nested items automatically select Recursive scanning of organizational items. If you select this option, then select items in the tree view (see step 6), all nested items are selected.

  6. Next, in the Pane that displays the tree-view of the Publications and Organizational Items, select the organizational items from which you want to Purge items.
  7. To delete Workflow Process Histories for items that have finished Workflow Processes for the entire Content Management system, select the Workflow process histories tab and fill in the following fields:
    • Select the Delete process histories check-box.
    • To delete process histories after a specific date, enter the date in the Delete process histories from before field.
  8. To delete Publish transactions, select the Publish Transactions tab, and select the Delete publish transactions check-box. Specify the following parameters for the delete action:
    • To purge publication transactions that have finished successfully, select the Successful transaction check-box.
    • To purge publish transactions that did not finish successfully, select the Failed transactions check box.
    • To specify the date before which the publish transactions will be purged, select the Delete publish transactions completed before the following date check box and enter a date.

      For example, if you enter 20-Mar-2002 or 20/3/2003, publish transactions before this date are purged. Both “-” and “/” can be used as separators and the month field can be either text or numeric.

  9. To save these settings to run the Purge Tool from a command line, click File > Save from the menu. You can then save your settings to an XML file. You can run the XML Purge Tool file from the command line. Note that you cannot use this file from the Purge Tool.
  10. To purge the Content Manager based on your selections, click the Purge button.

What to do next

A Purge Tool log file is created. If you purged, items fitting the criteria for the purge are deleted.

See also: Viewing the Purge Tool Log file.