Get Items by template id in a scheduled task

Question

Scenario:

I have over 10,000 items in my sitecore/content tree. Nearly 2,000 of them are thrived from the Article template. Inside of the Article items, there are two important fields: Is Featured - Checkbox, and Featured Expiration Date - Date.

I like to create a scheduled task that finds only the items that thrive from **@@[templateId="{My template id}"], and Fields["Is Featured"].value == "1". After that, I would check for the value of Fields["Featured Expiration Date"]. If the value is <= DateTime.Now; then, I'm going to remove the Is Featured flag, and update the item.

Is this even possible as a scheduled task?

Answer 1

The scheduled task is going to be a tool used to execute code you've written. There are ways to create custom commands in C# or use the existing on that is included with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE).

For simplicity, I'll show you how to do that in SPE. Here's a really good section in the book covering the creating of task scripts.

Examples

In this question I showed a few ways to perform queries in SPE. In the following I'll use the Sitecore Query syntax.

Example: The following queries all items that have the IsFeatured field checked true.

Get-Item -Path "master:" -Query "/sitecore/content//*[@IsFeatured = '1']"

Example: The following queries all the items with a NewsDate greater than 2017-10-01.

Get-Item -Path "master:" -Query "/sitecore/content//*[@NewsDate > '20171001T000000']"

To combine the queries together you can do

[@IsFeatured = '1' and @NewsDate > '20161001T000000'].

Here's a nice screenshot of me running the command inside of the Console bundled with SPE.

After the PowerShell script is written and saved. You can configured the scheduled task.

Answer 2

If you don't want to install SPE module like @Michael West suggested, there is another way to do this. You can implement a custom class for your agent and add it to schedule with a config patch.

A config patch to add your class to the schedule can look like this:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <scheduling>
      <agent type="YourNamespace.YourAgentClass, YourAssemblyName" method="Run" name="AgentName" interval="01:00:00"/>
    </scheduling>
  </sitecore>
</configuration> 

In that config patch, you specify your agent's class name, a method to execute (Run) and interval.

Your custom class can look like this:

public class YourAgentClass
{
    public void Run()
    {

    }
}

Inside Run method you can use search index to find your items:

using (var context = index.CreateSearchContext())
{
    var results = context.GetQueryable<ArticleSearchResultItem>()
              .Where(item => item.TemplateId == ArticleTemplateId
                             && item.IsFeatured == true)
              .ToList();
}

ArticleSearchResultItem class can look like this:

public class ArticleSearchResultItem
{
    [IndexField("_group")]
    [TypeConverter(typeof(IndexFieldIDValueConverter))]
    public virtual ID ItemID { get; set; }

    [IndexField("_template")]
    [TypeConverter(typeof(IndexFieldIDValueConverter))]
    public virtual ID TemplateId { get; set; }

    [IndexField("isfeatured")]
    public virtual bool IsFeatured{ get; set; }
}

You can also extend existing SearchResultItem class.