"Silently" Create Item - Create Item Without Triggering Indexing or other Events

Question

I know that when I edit items, I can pass true to the EndEdit method to save the item without triggering events/indexing on save. Since I almost always want to edit an item after creating it, it seems silly to me that my item should be indexed twice. How can I make it so that the item is only indexed once, after saving?

Answer 1

If you decompile and have a look at the Sitecore.Data.Items.ItemEditing class, in Sitecore.Kernel, you will find that all the EndEdit(bool) method does (and the relevant parts of its overload methods do) is essentially wrap the the call to ItemManager.SaveItem with an EventDisabler.

Solution 1:

To apply the same technique in order to make sure that your new item only indexes once for the entire creation and editing process, instead once for creation and once for editing, you could do the following:

using (new EventDisabler()) 
{
    var newItem = parent.Add(name, templateId);
}

newItem.Editing.BeginEdit();
newItem.Fields["Foo"].Value = fooFieldValue;
newItem.Editing.EndEdit();

The problem with this solution, however, is that it will disable all events on create, not just indexing events. What if you have item:created or item:added events?

Solution 2:

An an alternative, you could do the following:

IndexCustodian.PauseIndexing();
var newItem = parent.Add(name, templateId);
IndexCustodian.ResumeIndexing();

newItem.Editing.BeginEdit();
newItem.Fields["Foo"].Value = fooFieldValue;
newItem.Editing.EndEdit();

The problem here is that when you call PauseIndexing you are actually pausing indexing for the entire site. Sure, you're doing it for a very short amount of time, but you are still setting yourself up for failure.

Solution 3:

Another alternative is to try something like the following:

using (new BulkUpdateContext()) 
{
    var newItem = parent.Add(name, templateId);

    newItem.Editing.BeginEdit();
    newItem.Fields["Foo"].Value = fooFieldValue;
    newItem.Editing.EndEdit();
}

This should do what you are looking for, except that it won't work as expected if you want to add child/descendant items to your item or one of its descendants (if adding from a branch template) in the same closure. By example, the following will not work as expected, because the parent, newItem, for the childItem won't be available when the childItem is added:

using (new BulkUpdateContext()) 
{
    var newItem = parent.Add(name, templateId);

    newItem.Editing.BeginEdit();
    newItem.Fields["Foo"].Value = fooFieldValue;
    newItem.Editing.EndEdit();

    var newChildItem = newItem.Add(childName, childTemplateId);
    ...
}

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to temporarily disable indexing for a particular item or for an item creation without using one of the above. Hopefully, one of them will fit your needs.

Answer 2

Have you tried to pause indexing for the time of creating and editing item operation? Something like this one:

try    
{
  Sitecore.ContentSearch.Maintenance.IndexCustodian.PauseIndexing();
  // your code here
}
finally
{
  Sitecore.ContentSearch.Maintenance.IndexCustodian.ResumeIndexing()
}

Sitecore might have some logic for analyzing and optimizing data to be indexed.