Delete an item and optionally, its children in a Push source

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In this article

Request template
Sample request

Being able to delete a single item in a Push source, possibly along with its children, can be especially useful when you’re testing the service or performing a very small content update.

Use the Delete an item and optionally its children request only to delete one item, or an item and its children. To maximize efficiency and comply with API consumption limits, don’t use this request repeatedly to delete many items in a Push source. If this is what you need to do, you should either use:

The batch update requests.
The Delete old items request.

Sequence diagram for DELETE documents request

Sequence diagram illustrating the handling of a Delete an item and optionally its children Push API request (highlighted) as it progresses through the Coveo indexing pipeline.

Request template

DELETE https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<MyOrganizationId>/sources/<MySourceId>/documents?deleteChildren=<true|false>&documentId=<MyItemURI> HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer <MyAccessToken>

Parameters

In the request path:

Replace <MyOrganizationId> with the actual ID of the target Coveo organization (see Retrieve the organization ID).
Replace <MySourceId> with the actual ID of the target Push source (see Create a Push source).

In the query string:

Set deleteChildren to true to delete all items whose URLs begin with <MyItemURI> + /. For example, if documentId is set to file://folder, items file://folder/file1.txt and file://folder/subfolder/file2.txt would be deleted.

Set deleteChildren to false otherwise.
Replace <MyItemURI> with the URL-encoded URI of the item to delete in the target Push source (for example, file%3A%2F%2Ffolder%2FdummyItem.html).

In the Authorization HTTP header:

Replace <MyAccessToken> with a Push source API key that grants the set of privileges required to push items to your source.

Request body:

{}

Successful response: 202 Accepted

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A successful response (202 Accepted) indicates that the delete operation was successfully forwarded to the service and is now enqueued to be processed in the Coveo indexing pipeline. This doesn’t imply that the item was successfully deleted in the target Push source (see About the Push API processing delay).

Leading practice: Update the status of your Push source

If you set your Push source to an active status before, you should consider setting it back to the IDLE status once this request has successfully returned, assuming you have no more requests to perform as part of this content update (see Updating the status of a Push source).

Sample request

The following example shows how to delete an item and its children.

DELETE https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/mycoveocloudv2organizationg8tp8wu3/sources/mycoveocloudv2organizationg8tp8wu3-rp5rxzbdz753uhndklv2ztkfgy/documents?deleteChildren=true&documentId=file%3A%2F%2Ffolder%2F HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer **********-****-****-****-************

Request body:

{}