Simple and Fastest way to Delete All Items from a SharePoint List

Deleting a large number of items from SharePoint list, the best way I found was to use "SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.ProcessBatchData" as it avoided the API and was considerably faster.

I have created a Console utility to achieve this. This utility accepts two arguments:

1. Server URL

2. List Name

Below is the full code of the utility:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace DeleteAllItemsFromList

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

string serverUrl = string.Empty;

string listName = string.Empty;

if (args.Count() > 1)

{

try

{

//Read input from Console

//First argument as ServerURL

serverUrl = args[0];

//Second argument as ListName

listName = args[1];

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(serverUrl))

{

using (SPWeb web = site.RootWeb)

{

SPList list = web.Lists[listName];

SPListItemCollection splic = list.Items;

StringBuilder batchString = new StringBuilder();

batchString.Append("");

foreach (SPListItem item in splic)

{

batchString.Append("");

batchString.Append("" + Convert.ToString(item.ParentList.ID) + "");

batchString.Append("" + Convert.ToString(item.ID) + "");

batchString.Append("Delete");

batchString.Append("

");

}

batchString.Append("

");

web.ProcessBatchData(batchString.ToString());

}

}

Console.WriteLine("Done.");

}

catch (Exception exc)

{

Console.WriteLine("ERROR:" + exc.Message);

}

}

else

{

Console.WriteLine("ERROR: Please provide serverUrl[0] and listName[1] as arguments.");

}

}

}

}

Happy Coding!!!