Tag: VBO

Views Bulk Operations and Taxonomies – school of hard knocks

Views Bulk Operations is a great tool for making batched changes to large amounts of data. I have been using it for the last couple of days to add taxonomy terms to the around 17,000 new nodes that I added recently. And I just learned something the hard way.

Take care if you make bulk changes to taxonomies. It is not too difficult to inadvertently add the same term to a specific vocabulary over and over this way. Vocabs are meant to be updated dynamically; as the user add new terms to content, they are added to the vocab. On a individual basis, the autocomplete or dropdowns would ensure that the same term is reused if supplied instead of adding a new term for the SAME TERM. Which is what I did by mistake yesterday. And it was a mess.

Because I didn’t approach the VBO operation properly, I added the same term over and over again, to the tune of 8,000 times. Yuck. So, when I realized what I had done, I used VBO Delete to remove the extraneous terms. But what I didn’t consider was the overall impact of such a move. When I deleted all the individual terms that way, I deleted the nodes as well. 8,000 of them. Ouch.

A quick call to the BEST HOSTING COMPANY EVER – Blackmesh – and a restore was underway and the lesson was absorbed with tail between legs. I lost a whole day’s work, yes. But I gained a lot of insight as to how not to make this mistake again.

This is a fairly high level approach to what I did:

  • Created a vocabulary for the Content type
  • Created all the terms that I plan to use for this project
  • Added a term reference on the content type linked to the vocab
  • Used the autocomplete widget for the field
  • In the VBO View for this, chose the field for that content type that will hold the tax term
  • When running the VBO, I made sure the choose the predefined tax term. Since I used the autocomplete widget, i would type the first letters and wait for the complete choice to appear. This ensured that the existing term was being used
  • There was one node that needed its own term. I ran the VBO against this one node and added a new term to make sure that I was correct about new terms being added automatically. I was correct. This also confirmed that previously I had added what the system thought was a new term, every time the VBO changed a node
  • as I went through this, I checked the vocab to make sure that the number of terms was consistent with the original terms I had added.

Views Bulk Operations and mass Taxonomies changes

I have all my new nodes in place, about 17,000 of them. And now I need to be able to tag them so the searches are easier and more relevant.

One thing I did that was smart (for a change) is to append a unique descriptor to the title of each node during creation based on the original source. So all Supreme Court cases are appended with a -SC for example. This was really key for me. Without proper data prep, it will be a mess. So plan ahead.

So, using Views Bulk Operations, I am filtering the content type that I have created for this content based on these unique values. I am then able to change the blank “term reference” field on the content type to whatever I want. Something that will be easy to search for.

A word of caution. I wasn’t able to do these changes in one large job. I had to break it up into more manageable chunks, for me about a 1000 nodes at a time. I’m not 100% sure what the issue was, I was just receiving a lot of timeouts and hung queries. So be prepared to make a few concessions on time to get the op done.