Bulk item creation in Sitecore
I am using Sitecore 8, Update 3.
I'm trying to bulk create a couple of thousand elements that use a custom template. All of these elements are created under one specific parent element.
The custom template has two fields: Path [Single Line Text] and Target [Shared Link].
The data source is in the old SQL database.
Is there a way to do this?
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The Sitecore Data Importer site module is an option for you.
Creating a custom importer using the sitecore api is also possible, to speed things up, you can disable index rebuild.
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Since your data is already in the SQL Serve, you should take a look at using SSIS components for Sitecore, it was designed to import exactly this kind of data in bulk into Sitecore using ETL.
More information can be found in the blog post Build your first project with SSIS components for Sitecore and also add some additional Migrating to Sitecore: Moving from WordPress to Sitecore with a post about SQL Server Integration Services .
Integration Services components for Sitecore are available on the Sitecore Marketplace and are compatible with Sitecore XP8.
I will also add if you create something with more than 100 items below one parent item then it is not recommended Sitecore items are placed in the Item bucket. Make sure you factor this into account, or split your items into smaller sub-folders (e.g. year / month folders for news article items).
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In these scenarios, you usually write code to call the api and create items programmatically, rather than doing generic imports.
If you need to create a large number of items, I would recommend writing a console application to do this. You can use the Sitecore Web api to create items outside of the Sitecore context, or to explore the new Entity Service api in Sitecore, both of which will be able to create large numbers of Sitecore items.
http://mikerobbins.co.uk/2015/01/06/entityservice-sitecore-service-client/
If you're not a boater, you can always write asynchronous code to create Sitecore items and execute it on an aspx page on a Sitecore instance - works well for one task.
Example of asynchronous page processing in ASP.net Web Formats (.NET 2.0)
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