How do I bulk delete ontology objects?

Ask the Community
1

In ontology explorer I can use the delete action to delete one at a time, but it won’t work when selecting more than one ontology object. I assume this means I need a new action to delete many at time? Not sure how to do this…

2

Deleting objects in bulk is not directly configurable from the Ontology Manager to add a layer of protection here.

To set this up manually, create the following Typescript function:

@OntologyEditFunction()
public deleteMultipleObjects(objects: ObjectSet<DemoObjectType>): void {
   objects.all().forEach(o => {
      o.delete()
   })
}

Then make sure you wrap this function in an action and you can pass an object set through to be deleted in bulk!

3

An action can be applied to multiple objects by toggling “Allow multiple values” in the object reference parameter. Then in Workshop, an Object Table can use “enable multi-select”, which creates checkboxes for each row and a “Select all” checkbox in the table headers row. These selected objects can then be collectively passed to the action (example below).

image

I don’t know if there is a limit to the number of objects that can be deleted by an action.

More info: palantir foundry - How can I apply an Action to more than one object in a Workshop table? - Stack Overflow

4

Update: This solved the issue – An action can be applied to multiple objects by toggling “Allow multiple values” in the object reference parameter. Then in Workshop, an Object Table can use “enable multi-select”, which creates checkboxes for each row and a “Select all” checkbox in the table headers row. These selected objects can then be collectively passed to the action.

https://community.palantir.com/t/how-to-bulk-apply-an-action-function-to-all-existing-objects/963/2

1 Like
5

To be a bit more exhaustive on this question: Flushing objects also depends how were those object created : via action ? functions ? Present in the backing dataset ?

You have a few options depending on the above:

  • If the object comes from the backing dataset: you can change your pipeline to flush the dataset (e.g. snapshot it by limiting to zero rows)
  • If the object were created by users (via actions or functions) you can drop all edits on the Object Type. You can do this in Ontology Manager. See https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/object-edits/how-edits-applied#how-to-discardwipedelete-existing-user-edits
  • If you want to delete only a subset of the objects and not “all” you will need to use an action.
    • You can create an action with an array of objects to delete. The array can be quite big (10k see https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/action-types/scale-property-limits).
    • You can create the same action and call it via Automate on all objects (so that it will batch 10k by 10k until all objects are deleted)
    • You can use a functions + Action - but it has no advantage compared to use a simple action + array of objects to delete. You can however write some logic to decide whether or not a given object should be deleted.