How to Delete All Products Within a Category

Question

Main Question

How can I delete all products within a specific category?

Detailed Version: My goal is to remove the products and product images completely from my store inventory. I plan to use the products' category as a way to target the products for removal.

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Secondary Questions

Built Into Magento? Does Magento offer this feature within the control panel?

Third-Party GUI? Does a third-party GUI for this feature exist?

Third-Party Script? Does a third-party script for this feature exist?

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What I've Found

I found a third-party PHP script, that could be a solution. But the blog post was published in 2011, so I don't know if the PHP script will work with the current 1.9 series, of the Magento Community Edition.

This is the third-party PHP script I found: https://oldwildissue.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/delete-all-the-products-in-a-given-category-via-php/

Answer 1

You can add button to category edit page like in this tutorial. And send ajax request to controller which remove all assigned products.

Use loaded category for get all assigned products and just remove it.

$productCollection = $category->getProductCollection();
foreach ($productCollection as $product) {
    $product->isDeleted(true);
}
$productCollection->save();

For remove all assigned images use the function below

public function removeProductImages($product)
{
    if ($product->getId()) {
        $mediaApi = Mage::getModel("catalog/product_attribute_media_api");
        $items = $mediaApi->items($product->getId());
        foreach ($items as $item) {
            $mediaApi->remove($product->getId(), $item['file']);
        }
    }
}

Just modify first script. And as a result you have:

$productCollection = $category->getProductCollection();
foreach ($productCollection as $product) {
    $product->isDeleted(true);
    $this->removeProductImages($product);
}
$productCollection->save();

Answer 2

The question is really too broad. As others have commented, you can delete products that are within a specific category via the database. And not only commented, you linked a code-example as well which you can turn into a simple shell-script. Due to references, deletions should populate properly.

Flush cache and re-index afterwards.

Naturally removing data from the database won't remove images on disk. As this has never been the case (and Magento only knows about some of those images anyway when your turn it around a little bit), so you're not the only one with the problem. You could just take an existing script, like (only to give one example):

$ n98-magerun.phar media:images:removeorphans

This is part of a Magerun third party module named magerun-addons (by Peter Jaap Blaakmeer).

Answer 3

You can do this from the admin panel.

Catalog -> Manage Categories -> Select your category -> Select "Category Products" then uncheck the checkbox found in the grid header and save.