Bucket Sync after item deletion

Question

Sitecore advises that you should sync a bucket after you delete an item from it.

I have a mass import process that adds/updates/deletes items. The bucket contains hundreds of thousands of items and I would prefer not to do a full bucket sync at the end.

I've decompiled the Buckets code and it looks like syncing just moves unbucketable items to the root and deletes empty folders. There is a IsSynced flag in the pipeline args but I don't think it's used for anything.

So my questions are:

Is the advice to sync after deleting items just a housekeeping thing (cleaning up empty folders), or does it have some material impact on the functionality of the bucket?

Could I just implement some logic to clean up the ancestor folders at the point that I delete an item, or is there some other magic that the sync process does that I'd be missing?

Answer 1

I can find no magic ;-)

While the bucket sync takes care of a great many things, in your specific case (deleting a bucket item), it really is just a cleanup. The hosting folder will get deleted if there are no other child items in the folder.

    if (!this.ShouldDeleteInCreationOfBucket(current) || current.GetChildren(ChildListOptions.SkipSorting).Any<Item>())
      return;
    current.Delete();

The ShouldDeleteInCreationOfBucket call really just tests if the current items being processed is a BucketFolder. So to paraphrase "if this is not a BucketFolder or if there are .Any children present, return. Otherwise delete the item (BucketFolder without children)".

You could implement similar logic on the delete event; but it really is just a bit of housekeeping that I can't see breaking any stuff even if you don't.

For reference, when deleting via the UI, the event item:bucketing:deleting will get raised. I don't see this happening in a programmatic item delete.