Deleting List Items in Bulk in SharePoint 2010

There are times when we have a list of records to be deleted from a SharePoint list and we do not want to loop it one by one and delete it for performance reason. There is a better way to deal with these type of scenario.

The method which is used for this is ProcessBatchData.

See the below code snippet how to use this.

SPSite _site = SPContext.Current.Site;

SPWeb _web = _site.OpenWeb();

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

{

    SPList _list = _web.Lists["ListName"];

    SPQuery _query = new SPQuery();

    _query.Query = "<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name='PrimaryKeyID' /><Value Type='Text'>" + PrimaryKeyID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";

    SPListItemCollection _collection = _list.GetItems(_query);

    if (_collection.Count > 0)

      {

         StringBuilder sbDelete = new StringBuilder();

         sbDelete.Append("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><Batch>");

         string command = "<Method><SetList Scope=\"Request\">" + _list.ID + "</SetList><SetVar Name=\"ID\">{0}</SetVar><SetVar Name=\"Cmd\">Delete</SetVar></Method>";

         foreach (SPListItem item in _collection)

          {

            sbDelete.Append(string.Format(command, item.ID.ToString()));

          }

          sbDelete.Append("</Batch>");

          _web.ProcessBatchData(sbDelete.ToString());

      }

});