LibGuides: FL-Islandora Guide: Advanced Site Management

Information for Advanced Users

How to Purge an Object
To purge an object is to completely remove it and its record from the repository. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to purging a single object.
NOTE: Purging cannot be undone. If you purge an object then the object and its entire administrative history are removed.
How to Purge Multiple Objects from a Collection
For larger batch deletions, Islandora supports removing multiple objects from a collection simultaneously - including any child collections. This tutorial will walk you through the steps for purging multiple objects.
NOTE: This action cannot be undone. You will not be asked to confirm your selection of objects to purge.
Security & Access Control in Islandora
Security in Islandora leverages both Drupal’s Access Control infrastructure (Drupal Roles and Permissions) with Fedora’s XACML security framework to create a highly flexible framework that can write restrictions to the datastream and IP level.
Islandora Documentation Version 7 Wiki
This documentation space is for Islandora 7.x, which pairs Drupal 7 with Fedora 3.x.

Use with caution

Delete content

Navigate to the collection whose members you want to delete and click "Manage".
Click “Collection” from the top menu and “Delete members of this collection” from the left-hand sidebar.
Use the checkboxes to select the member(s) you want to delete, and then click “Delete Selected Objects”.

NOTE: if the objects are shared with another collection, they are only removed from the current collection, but not deleted from the repository -- they will still be available in the other collection that they are shared with. This method does not work for Books. It will delete the Book parent (metadata) but leave the book pages in the repository as orphaned objects.

Unitary objects

To delete a single unitary content object (PDF, Large Image, Basic Image, Audio, etc.), navigate to the object to be deleted and click the "Manage" tab. Click “Properties” to get the Properties form, then click the “Delete” button. Do not set the object state to “Deleted” -- this will suppress the object from view but it will not delete the object from the repository.

Compound objects

For compound objects, deleting the compound object does not delete the child content objects that belong to it -- it simply deletes the parent object. At this time it does not remove the links from the children to the parent, so the child objects “think” they are still related.

To delete the parent and render the children independent, first detach the children from the parent. Navigate to the parent object and click the "Manage" tab. Click “Compound” to get the compound object management form.

Below the prompt to add more child objects is a block to Remove Child Objects, which lists all child objects attached to the parent. Select the checkboxes of the objects to detach, scroll to the bottom of the form, and click “Submit”.

Then go to the Properties form of the parent object and delete the parent object.

Paged Objects

To delete a book, navigate to the book to be deleted and click the "Manage" tab. Click “Properties” to get the Properties form, then click the “Delete Book” button. Do not set the object state to “Deleted” -- this will suppress the book from view but it will not delete the object from the repository.

NOTE : do not try to delete a book by going to the collection containing the book and using the "Mangage" tab, Collection, Delete members of this collection. The book parent (metadata) will be deleted but the pages will remain as orphaned objects in the repository. Similarly, you can’t delete a book by deleting the collection containing the book. Although the user interface will tell you all non-shared objects in the collection will be deleted, for books only the book parent (metadata) will be deleted and the pages will remain as orphaned objects in the repository.

Shared objects

When an object is shared with another collection, if you want to remove the object from one collection while leaving it in the other(s), do not use use the object level "Manage" then click "Properties", then click “Delete”. That will delete the object from the repository entirely. Instead, go to the collection from which you want to remove the object and use "Manage" Collection, then click “Delete members of this collection”. That will remove the object from that collection while leaving it in the repository and any other associated collections.

Delete a collection

Navigate to the collection you want to delete and click "Manage".
Click “Properties” from the top menu.
At the bottom of the screen there is a “Delete collection” button, click “Delete Collection”.

NOTE: This does not work for Books. The book parent (metadata) will be deleted, but the pages will continue to exist as orphaned objects in the repository. This will also delete objects that are members of the collection, but it will NOT delete objects which are shared with another collection, only those that belong to only the deleted collection.

Do NOT set the state to "Deleted". This will make the collection inaccessible, but it will still exist in the repository.