Clean up catalog metadata system

When I read this forum post: http://world.episerver.com/Forum/Developer-forum/EPiServer-Commerce/Thread-Container/2014/10/How-to-clean-commerce-installation-from-metadata/ , I realized we had problems with garbage metaclasses/metafields in our catalog system. When the catalog import/export tool exports the catalog, it will export all the metaclasses existing in the system, even the metaclasses you don’t want to include in the catalog package. And those classes will come along with all of the sites importing that package, become garbage that no one wants and no one cares. Usually, they are harmless. But we once had a problem when our test data package accidentally contains too many unused metaclasses, it makes the import/export process much slower. And because we have hundreds of tests which requires import/export, our server build greatly slowed down, from 10 minutes to more than 20 minutes. We had to strip all the unused metaclasses to make the build fast again. Even when you don’t have that kind of problem, it’s still a good idea to keep your metadata system tidy and clean. That’s why I come up with this quick and dirty code. It’s basically an ASPX, which you can drop in your project, build it then run.

The code behind:

using Mediachase.BusinessFoundation.Data.Sql;
using Mediachase.Commerce.Storage;
using Mediachase.MetaDataPlus;
using Mediachase.MetaDataPlus.Configurator;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Data;
using System.Linq;

namespace EPiServer.Commerce.Sample
{
    public partial class CleanMetaData : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        private List _unused = new List();
        private List _mfList = new List();
        ///  
        /// Handles the Load event of the Page control. 
        ///  
        /// The source of the event. 
        /// The  instance containing the event data. 
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //Finding unused metaclasses
            var metaClassCollection = Mediachase.MetaDataPlus.Configurator.MetaClass.GetList(MetaDataContext.Instance, true)
                .Cast().Where(c => c.IsUser && c.Parent.Namespace.Equals("Mediachase.Commerce.Catalog.System", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)
                &&!c.Name.Equals("CatalogNodeEx", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) 
                && !c.Name.Equals("CatalogEntryEx", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase));
            var unused = metaClassCollection.ToList();
            foreach (var mc in metaClassCollection)
            {
                var mcQuery = SqlHelper.ExecuteReader(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["EcfSqlConnection"].ConnectionString, CommandType.Text,
            string.Format("Select CatalogEntryId from CatalogEntry WHERE MetaClassId = {0} UNION" +
                           " SELECT CatalogNodeId from CatalogNode WHERE MetaClassId = {0} ", mc.Id));
                if (mcQuery.Read())
                {
                    unused.Remove(mc);
                }
            }

            GridView1.DataSource = unused;
            GridView1.DataBind();

            var unusedMetaFieldIds = new List();
            var mfQuery = SqlHelper.ExecuteReader(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["EcfSqlConnection"].ConnectionString, CommandType.Text,
            string.Format("Select MetaFieldId from dbo.MetaField WHERE NameSpace like 'Mediachase.Commerce.Catalog%' " +
             " AND MetaFieldId not in (select distinct(metaFieldId) from dbo.MetaClassMetaFieldRelation) "));
                while (mfQuery.Read())
                {
                    unusedMetaFieldIds.Add(mfQuery.GetInt32(0));
                }

            _mfList = new List();
            foreach(var mf in unusedMetaFieldIds)
            {
                _mfList.Add(MetaField.Load(MetaDataContext.Instance, mf));
            }

            GridView2.DataSource = _mfList.Select(c => new {c.Id,  c.Name, c.FriendlyName, c.Namespace, c.DataType});
            GridView2.DataBind();
        }


        protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //Delete unused metaclasses
            foreach(var mc in _unused)
            {
                MetaClass.Delete(MetaDataContext.Instance, mc.Id);
            }

            //Delete unused metafields
            foreach(var mf in _mfList)
            {
                MetaField.Delete(MetaDataContext.Instance, mf.Id);
            }

            //Clear cache & refresh
            MetaHelper.ClearMetaClassCache();
            Response.Redirect(Request.RawUrl);
        }
    }
}

The markup, save this will generate the designer.cs file:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" Inherits="EPiServer.Commerce.Sample.CleanMetaData" CodeBehind="~/CleanMetaData.aspx.cs" %>
                                                                                                
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 
    <head runat="server"> 
        <title>Clean catalog metadata system</title> 
    </head> 
    <body> 
        <form id="aspnetForm" runat="server"> 
            <div class="epi-contentContainer epi-padding"> 
                <div class="epi-contentArea"> 
                    <h1 class="EP-prefix">Clean catalog metadata system</h1> 
                </div>
            </div>
            <p> 
                <asp:Label ID="Label3" runat="server">Unused metaclasses:</asp:Label> 
            </p> 
            <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server"> 
            </asp:GridView> 
            <br />
                <asp:Label ID="Label4" runat="server">Unused metafields:</asp:Label> 
            <br />
            <asp:GridView ID="GridView2" runat="server">
            </asp:GridView>
            <br />
                <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" OnClick="Button1_Click" Text="Clean" /> 
        </form> 
    </body> 
</html>

And this is how it looks like:

Click clean and now you got rid of those unused metaclasses/metafields.

Please note that it’s highly recommended to backup your data first – as simple as just export a catalog.

Let’s go cleaning!