Bin Management Improvements - Deleted pages, attachments

amilica · July 3, 2025, 11:49am

Hello everyone! I’m here to discuss with you some improvements we can make to the bin management processes in XWiki.

Current situation

Global Admin > Content > Deletion section

The only option is to set Yes/No to Skipping the bin (helpful, but we could do much more than this to be helpful to users)

Page Index > Deleted pages section

There’s no bulk actions or selection capabilities (like restore/delete all, restore/delete some pages)
There’s no linking between the Delete admin section and the list of deleted pages
There’s no input search for Title (maybe this is just a version bug - 16.10.8)

Page Index > Deleted attachments section

same as for deleted pages, but there’s also no possibility to restore a deleted attachment

Deleted pages & attachments redesign

The redesign would be based mainly on introducing batch actions. Thus, it needs to be based on the global Batch Actions Proposal. Even if this linked proposal is around Live Data, UI decisions should be consistent in Live Table too. Obviously, if we plan to migrate all live tables to live data, then there’s no need to change the UI for live tables too.

Linking to Global Admin Delete section

It would be good to have a quick link to the administration section that concerns deletion where the user can set up automatic flows of deletion and stuff like that.

State 0 | No selected items

If the user didn’t selected anything, the batch actions would be hidden. The Administer bins action will be present regardless of the selection, but with a different style.

State 1 | Items selected

This is how the live data would looks like with the mentioned proposal’s ideas.
Clicking on any of the batch actions available in this screen would make a modal of confirmation appear.

Global Admin > Content > Delete | Section redesign

We introduce several new sections:

A direct link to deleted pages and attachments
Quick clean actions - we compute how much storage would the user get back if they cleaned all deleted items (pages and attachments separately)
Automatic bin cleaning - we allow the user to set up an automation of cleaning the deleted data based on a set period of time.

We’d also change the name of “Can skip the recycle bin” to “Allow skipping the recycle bin” - we focus on the action that the user can perform, not on the items’ propriety of being able to do something.

What do you think about all of this?

Jira ticket

Simpel · July 5, 2025, 11:44am

Hi.

I would really love the automatic bin cleaning based on a set period of time. Second I would love to delete all checked items in “one” click.

I would like the possibility to check all filtered items at once to delete them in a next step with another click.

We have the policy to keep everything in bin for 3 month. Currently this is only possible with two scripts we build, one for documents and another for attachments.

For documents we scripted it from a mixture of:

For the attachments we used that script in parts and mixed it with:

https://snippets.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/PurgeAttachmentsRecycleBin#HAdvancedversion28deletesattachmentsolderthanagivendate2Cfrommultiplewikis29

So as an admin I would love those proposals.
Simpel

vmassol · July 5, 2025, 3:52pm

No it’s not. I have the same in 17.5.0. I think it dates back to when we were not filtering the title field in the LD tables and we “fixed” the Index LT but not the delete pages one. Unless there’s a technical issue to query the titles for deleted docs.

Pretty dangerous In any case we have protection already about deleting extension pages. I remember we discussed having a config option to fully disable deleting extension pages but I don’t remember if we implemented it. But if we go with batch actions, I believe we should think about it even more.

Yes, we don’t have this feature. Right now we need to undelete a page to undelete an attachment. See Loading...

Note that the Page Index has been moved to LD (It’s using a LD in 17.5.0 for example).

I’m not sure about this (I’m actually -0 and probably even -1). Right now we try to have our admins actions in the Admin UI so that they don’t clutter the generic UI. It’s not everyday that you need to administer bins whereas you need to go to the page index a lot more.

Also you didn’t mention it but that button should only appear for users having admin rights ofc.

See my comments on that proposal. I don’t like the inconsistency between single actions and batch actions.

Also, IMO “Administer bins” should not be there since it’s not related to the selected items.

I like the idea of providing more Admin actions to clean deleted pages and attachments, but I don’t think the Admin UI is the right place for it. We should have this directly in the Page Index UI since when we implement batch actions, we’ll get this feature for free.

Re the computations, would that be done only after you click some button or do we need to always compute it and keep it stored somewhere?

Note that if we have this info, or if it’s easy to compute, I’d actually display it directly in the LD batch action for delete, displayed in parenthesis after the number of items concerned by the batch action.

Sounds good. This was discussed in the past a few times already.