collective.catalogcleanup 1.0

Usage and goal

Add collective.catalogcleanup to the eggs in your buildout (and to zcml on Plone 3.2 or earlier). This makes a browser view available on the Plone Site root: @@collective-catalogcleanup.

This goes through the portal_catalog and removes all catalog brains for which a getObject call does not work. In other words, it removes brains that no longer belong to an actual object in the site.

Similar cleanups are done for the uid_catalog and the reference_catalog.

The goal is to get rid of outdated brains that could otherwise cause problems, for example during an upgrade to Plone 4.

@@collective-catalogcleanup by default does a dry run, so it only reports problems. Call it with @@collective-catalogcleanup?dry_run=false to perform the actual cleanup.

Details

So what does the catalog cleanup do?

• It removes stuff! You must make a backup first!

• It handles these catalogs: portal_catalog, uid_catalog, reference_catalog.

• For each catalog it reports the number of catalog brains it contains.

• It removes brains that have a UID of None.

• It removes brains of which the object is broken. This can happen when the object belongs to a package that is no longer available in the Plone Site.

• It removes brains of which the object cannot be found.

• It looks for non unique uids. There can be some legitimate reasons why some brains may have the same UID, for example when they belong to comments: the UID is inherited from the parent object. Those items are kept. For other items we accept one object and we give the other objects a new UID.

• References between objects that no longer exist or are broken, will be removed.

• A simple report will be printed in the browser. For one catalog it may look like this:

  Handling catalog portal_catalog.
  Brains in portal_catalog: 20148
  portal_catalog: removed 25 brains without UID.
  portal_catalog: removed 100 brains with status broken.
  portal_catalog: removed 5 brains with status notfound.
  portal_catalog: 249 non unique uids found.
  portal_catalog: 249 items given new unique uids.

• The instance log may contain more info, about individual items.

Alternatives

• A clear and rebuild of the portal_catalog should have partially the same effect, but it will likely take a lot longer and it will not solve some of the problems mentioned above. But this is definitely the most logical thing to try before giving collective.catalogcleanup a go.

Compatibility

I have tried this on Plone 3.3 and 4.1. It will likely work on other versions as well.

I have not tried it with Dexterity items. It might not be needed for those. Likely, it will either succeed normally or you get an AttributeError somewhere and the cleanup run is aborted.

Authors

Maurits van Rees