How to delete all documents in Cosmosdb Collection

I have been working with couple of applications built with CosmosDB and one of the things that surprised me was one cannot clear all documents in a collection from the Azure web portal or using the Storage Explorer. As I was struggling to do this while doing some tests on the application I decided to write a blog on the solution I used. There are two ways to achieve the same

• Using a stored procedure
• Using Cosmosdb SDK

Using Cosmosdb SDK:

I came up with a script in Node which can be done with any of the programming languages such as C#,Python supported by the SDK

Let’s go through the steps:

Step 1:

Open VScode and Create a file named cosmosdb_helper.js

Step 2:

Let’s install the necessary packages needed.

Install documentdb javascript sdk with the following command,

npm i documentdb

and you will see the output as follows

Let’s install require to handle the dependencies with the following command,

npm i require

and you will see the output as follows,

Step 3: 

Let’s do some coding. You will be able to understand the following code with the comments added on each line,

	//lets import the necessary packages
	var docdb = require("documentdb");
	var async = require("async");
	// Get the host link which is the documentdb/cosmosdb url from the portal and masterkey is the authentication key
	var config = {
	host: "https://identityshareddocdb.documents.azure.com:443/",
	auth: {
	masterKey: "2XEDLvGfedNBDZMAv+EXnZ0SFR4a4MuVt1Fi6WmrRwH7SLcHrr0MvCFm9v+W83qfcJBJXedWjxT47PnNyB1DwA=="
	}
	};
	// Create the CosmosDB client
	let client = new docdb.DocumentClient(config.host, config.auth);
	// Creating the link
	let documentsLink = docdb.UriFactory.createDocumentCollectionUri("IdentityEventLog", "Events");
	// Retrive all documents
	let selectAll = function(callback) {
	var spec = {
	query: "SELECT * FROM c",
	parameters: []
	};
	client.queryDocuments(documentsLink, spec).toArray((err, results) => {
	callback(err, results);
	});
	};
	// Retrieve and delete all documents
	let deleteAll = function() {
	selectAll((err, results) => {
	if (err) {
	console.log(err);
	} else {
	async.forEach(results, (message, next) => {
	client.deleteDocument(message._self, err => {
	if (err) {
	console.log(err);
	next(err);
	} else {
	next();
	}
	});
	});
	}
	});
	};
	// Getting the input whether selectAll or deletAll
	let task = process.argv[2];
	switch (task) {
	case "selectAll":
	selectAll((err, results) => {
	if (err) {
	console.error(err);
	} else {
	console.log(results);
	}
	});
	break;
	case "deleteAll":
	deleteAll();
	break;
	default:
	console.log("Commands:");
	console.log("selectAll deleteAll");
	break;
	}

view raw cosmosdb helper hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Suppose if you have partitionKey created with your collection, you need to pass queryoptions with the partitionKey in selectAll as well as deletDocument as follows,

	//selectAll
	client.queryDocuments(documentsLink, spec,{ enableCrossPartitionQuery: true }).toArray((err, results) =>
	//deletDocument
	var options = {
	partitionKey:'SyncId'
	};
	client.deleteDocument(message._self,options, err => {

view raw cosmosdb delete partitionkey hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Step 4:

Let’s run the script and see the output,

You can run the helper script as follows,

if you want to list all documents in the collection,

node cosmosdb_helper.js selectAll

which will list the output of all documents in the collection.

If you want to delete all documents within a collection, you can run the script as,

node cosmosdb_helper.js deletAll

which will remove all documents in the collection.

Using a stored procedure:

As mentioned above, 2^nd way is to use the stored procecure given by Microsoft employee as mentioned here.

Hope the helper script will help someout out there in order to delete all documents in a collection. You can get the whole code from Cosmosd_Helper

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