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SharePoint PowerShell: Remove duplicate WebParts

By Winston ⋅ September 20, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Last week I received an email from a colleague who was having problems with a SharePoint 2007 upgrade. Actually, the upgrade went fine, but when he moved a Publishing Site Collection to a subsite of an existing site collection, he ran into several problems, one of which was that each page had a duplicate set of web parts.

I was about to go on vacation, but I had just published my PowerShell extensions and thought it would be a good opportunity to use them. So, in one of my prouder moments, I free-handed about 10 lines of PowerShell into an email and left town. I was delighted to find out that the code actually worked (once you removed the incorrect characters that Outlook had injected).

So, here’s a quick little blog post explaining what I did.

First, I spooled up a standalone SharePoint 2010 VM and ran PowerShell ISE.

Then I did the following to initialize my extensions:

cd \VboxSvr\host_m\Development\wfPowerShell
. .\Boostrapper.ps1

Next I needed a page to play with, so I created a test web part page and added a couple of web parts:

Now, I could have manually created the dupes, but it was more fun to try it with a script:

</p><h1>This function has virtually no practical application :)</h1><p>filter Duplicate-WebParts(){ $Page = $_
$webparts = $Page | Export-WebParts
$Page | Import-WebParts -WebPartInfos $webparts
}

$page = Get-SPWebRelative / | Get-SPFile 'Shared Documents/TestDupes.aspx'
1..3 | % { $page | Duplicate-WebParts | out-null }

This produced the following output:

11:36:24 PM Imported web part: Web Part Page Title Bar    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.TitleBarWebPart]
11:36:27 PM Imported web part:     [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart]
11:36:28 PM Imported web part: Content Editor    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart]
11:36:33 PM Imported web part: Web Part Page Title Bar    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.TitleBarWebPart]
11:36:33 PM Imported web part:     [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart]
11:36:34 PM Imported web part: Content Editor    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart]
11:36:35 PM Imported web part: Web Part Page Title Bar    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.TitleBarWebPart]
11:36:36 PM Imported web part:     [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.XsltListViewWebPart]
11:36:37 PM Imported web part: Content Editor    [Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart]

Since I ran it through my duplication function 2x, I now have 4 versions of each of the original webparts, as shown in the image below:

Finally, I tweaked my free-handed script with some better arguments and logging:


filter Remove-DuplicateWebParts([switch] $WhatIf, $DupeProperties = @('Title', { $_.GetType() })) {
    $Page = $_
    Log "processing WebPart duplicates in $($page.ServerRelativeUrl)"
    $webparts = $page | Get-WebParts
    $dupeGroups = $webparts | group $DupeProperties | where { $_.Count –gt 1 }
    $allDeletions = $dupeGroups | lwp -ActionLabel "Processing Dupe Group" -StatusReportBlock { $_.Name }  | % {
        $keep, $deletions = $_.Group
        return $deletions
    }
    if(!$WhatIf){
        $page | modify-webparts –delete –filter {
            ($allDeletions |> Id ) -contains $_.Id
        } | lwp -Action Deleted -Status { "$($_.Title) ($($_.Id))" } | log-item -prefix 'deleted '  -Process {"$($_.Title) ($($_.Id))"}  | out-null
    } else {
        $allDeletions | log-item -prefix "Delete " -Process {"$($_.Title) ($($_.Id))"} | out-null
    }
    return $Page
}

$page = Get-SPWebRelative / | Get-SPFile 'Shared Documents/TestDupes.aspx'
#1..2 | % { $page | Duplicate-WebParts | out-null }
$page | Remove-DuplicateWebParts | out-null

A couple of notes about what is going on here:

Using a filter is a quick/dirty way to support pipeline input, which is often terser and more fluid than using arguments
The simplest way to identify collections of dupes is to use the group function and supply a list of properties that, altogether, should make a webpart unique.
After identifying the dupes, loop through them, skipping the first one (which is the one we will $keep)
modify-webparts is my catch-all cmdlet for modifying, deleting, and closing webparts. I could have also just obtained a webpart manager and manually deleted, but this cmdlet makes it a no-brainer (and I was also looking for an excuse to demo it)

When executed, the script above produced the following output:

11:36:39 PM processing WebPart duplicates in /Shared Documents/TestDupes.aspx
11:36:42 PM deleted Web Part Page Title Bar (g<em>7571f1e5</em>1238<em>48d7</em>a029<em>66acf59d7a9c)
11:36:42 PM deleted Shared Documents (g</em>edb5d78a<em>c5ad</em>4f75<em>b134</em>01716c46f7eb)
11:36:43 PM deleted Content Editor (g<em>6f02ef6a</em>6c52<em>4c1c</em>864b<em>553dcddb27f8)
11:36:43 PM deleted Web Part Page Title Bar (g</em>19c9e065<em>4ac6</em>4329<em>9d3c</em>445b63cfac4e)
11:36:43 PM deleted Shared Documents (g<em>d1c7659a</em>6b26<em>43c2</em>88d7<em>b767349f689b)
11:36:43 PM deleted Content Editor (g</em>dc6cbcaf<em>0705</em>462e<em>ba39</em>a9fae18682fe)
11:36:43 PM deleted Web Part Page Title Bar (g<em>e1a26dc2</em>cc6f<em>49b6</em>bccd<em>ef825ab56dea)
11:36:43 PM deleted Shared Documents (g</em>20d52916<em>1bad</em>4c4c<em>9374</em>2fb27296b6cb)
11:36:43 PM deleted Content Editor (g<em>e1847600</em>d1f1<em>43c7</em>a83d_08f2273ac7ba)

and my page now looks like this (again):