Using item buckets

Current version: 9.1

Item buckets let you manage large numbers of items in the content tree. An item bucket is a container that you can use to hide a large number of items and still easily retrieve and work with these items. The only way to find bucket items is to use the Sitecore search engine.

When your content tree gets very large, you can have difficulty locating items, and performance can decrease. For example, if you have a website that markets or sells a large number of products or uses an ever-increasing number of media files, as you continually create more items, your content tree becomes unmanageable. If you use an item bucket to store your items instead, you can store an unlimited number of items in one container without displaying them in the content tree.

Using item buckets has many advantages, including:

  • All the content items in an item bucket are automatically organized in a logical format that increases the performance of the search engine.

  • A single item bucket can contain millions of content items without slowing down the UI or congesting the content tree.

  • You can have as many item buckets as you want. This lets you split up your item buckets into logical containers, for example, one for products and one for articles.

Storing items in an item bucket

An item bucket can contain both regular items and bucketable items:

  • Regular items (structured items) are stored in an item bucket, are visible in the content tree, and they maintain their parent-to-child relationship with their ancestors and descendants. These items are based on a template that does not support item buckets.

  • Bucketable items (unstructured items) are hidden in the content tree and do not maintain their parent-to-child relationship. These items are based on a template that supports item buckets.

    Important

    Do not store both regular and bucketable items in an item bucket. This can cause errors.

When you store items in an item bucket, the parent-to-child relationship between the items is removed, and instead the items are organized in a folder structure according to the date and time they were created. Therefore, the item buckets feature is primarily designed for storing content items that do not need to be stored in a hierarchy.

Note

Your Sitecore developer can configure your Sitecore solution to organize the items in the item bucket differently, for example, by their globally unique identifier (GUID).

To decide whether to turn an item into an item bucket, you must decide whether you need to keep the hierarchy of your items in the content tree. If you do not need subitems of an item to be stored in a particular way and if you have many items, item buckets can be a good idea.

The item creation date is set when an item is created. You can't modify it later. The date may differ from the creation date of individual item versions. Copying, duplicating, or cloning an item results in the creation of a new item with a new item creation date.

Synchronizing an item bucket

Whenever you change the bucketable settings for items in an item bucket, you must synchronize the item bucket to make sure that all the items are hidden or shown according to whether they are bucketable or not.

You must synchronize an item bucket when you:

  • Make a regular item that is stored in an item bucket into a bucketable item.

  • Make a bucketable item into a normal item.

  • Make a template bucketable.

  • Change a bucketable template into a normal template.

  • Delete an item from the item bucket.

Searching for hidden items

When bucketable items are stored in an item bucket, they are hidden in the content tree by default. This means that when you want to work with a bucketable item located in an item bucket, you need to use the Search functionality to find and open it from the list of search results.

When you convert an item into an item bucket, the item displays the Search tab in the editing pane where you can search for all the items in an item bucket, whether they are hidden bucketable items or regular items. Sitecore offers a wide range of search filters, search operations, and facets to help you find the content item that you are looking for.

The Search tab for an item bucket

Viewing hidden items

If you need to view the bucketable items that are hidden in an item bucket, in the Content Editor, click the View tab, and in the View group, select the Buckets check box.

The Buckets option on the View tab

When you work with item buckets, clear the Buckets check box. This prevents the system from unnecessarily loading all the items in the content tree and thereby slowing down performance. You can still work with the hidden content items by searching for them on the Search tab, which is available for every item bucket.

Warning

Do no add, remove, or move content items or folders in the bucket structure. Manual changes to the bucket structure can cause errors in indexing and publishing.

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