How to find out unused items

Question

The CMS has many duplicate/redundant items and I would like to delete them.
When I select an item (say Item-A) and check Navigate > Links, there are no items that refer Item-A.

But, somewhere else, Item A is being referred in the rendering datasource field like this: query:$site/Data/Banners

When items are not referenced directly and instead using a query, then even when I delete Item-A, it does not show any alert that it is being used.

In such scenario, is there a way to find out unused items.

Using Sitecore 10.1.3 with SXA.

Answer 1

This code helps to find the related item.

var unusedItems = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItems().Where(item =>
    !Sitecore.Globals.LinkDatabase.GetReferrers(item).Any());

and if you are using SPE, below code will help

# Get all items in the content tree
$allItems = Get-Item -Path "master:" -Language *

# Get the reference map
$refMap = Get-ItemReferrerMap -Item $allItems

# Find items not referenced by any other item
$unusedItems = $allItems | Where-Object { -not $refMap.ContainsKey($_.ID) }

# Output the unused items
$unusedItems | Format-Table -Property Name, ItemPath

Answer 2

I do not think there is a readymade solution available for this. These tokens $site is evaluated at runtime and hence you do not see it in references.

Since you already have content ready, you can create a handler when item is deleted item:deleting event and look for such cases under content node. This would be a complex code considering multiple scenarios like checking presentation and evaluating those tokens.

     public class OnItemDeletingValidator
       {
        public void OnItemDeleting(object sender, EventArgs args)
        {
         Item item = Event.ExtractParameter(args, 0) as Item;
         // Your logic to iterate through content items and find if this item is used under Page presentation
        }
       }

And register this event using a config patch file.

Here is an article with details - https://briancaos.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/sitecore-use-itemdeleting-event-to-avoid-deletion-of-items/

Hope this helps !