Call Cleanup Service programatically

Question

I wanted to build something similar to the following article: Schedule Sitecore Database cleanup tasks programatically

I do know that the cleanup database functionality is in Sitecore's launchpad -> Control Panel in my instance running version 8.1

The author does, what I believe, is a custom setup to call Sitecore's cleanup service. Code from the article is the following:

    namespace Sitecore.Foundation.ScheduledTasks.Services
    {
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Web;
    using log4net;
    using Sitecore.Data;
    using Sitecore.Data.Items;
    using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
    using Sitecore.Mvc.Extensions;
    using Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation;
    using Sitecore.Pipelines;
    using Sitecore.Pipelines.RenderField;
    using Sitecore.Tasks;
    using Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControls;
    using Sitecore.ExperienceContentManagement.Administration.Helpers.DbCleanup;

    public class ScheduledTasksService
    {
        public void Execute(Item[] items, CommandItem command, ScheduleItem schedule)
        {
            this.CleanupBlobs();
        }

        public void CleanupBlobs()
        {
            try
            {
                CleanupTaskRunner runner = new CleanupTaskRunner();
                TaskToRun task = new TaskToRun();
                task.Database = "web";
                task.Task = CleanupTasks.CleanupBlobs;
                runner.RunCleanUp(new TaskToRun[] { task });
            }
            catch(Exception e)
            {
                Log.Error("Error while cleaning Blobs table", e, this);
            }
        }
    }
}

I wanted to know if there is a more standard way of doing so. I don't have access to the Sitecore.ExperienceContentManagement.Administration.Helpers.DbCleanup

Answer 1

If you want to automate the cleanup service without writing any custom code you can use sitecore powershell to create a task as described in the documentation https://doc.sitecorepowershell.com/modules/integration-points/tasks, that will call a maintenance script under the System Maintenance module (/sitecore/system/Modules/PowerShell/Script Library/SPE/Maintenance/System Maintenance/Tasks/Clean up databases):

In order to install SPE you can follow the steps described in the installation doc https://doc.sitecorepowershell.com/installation.

In order to fix the compilation error for the namespace Sitecore.ExperienceContentManagement.Administration.Helpers.DbCleanup you need to add the nuget package Sitecore.ExperienceContentManagement.Administration specifying your sitecore 8.1 version