New for Headless CMS: Collection export

Yes, a challenge with today’s Headless CMS is the inability to bulk edit or sort. You can change one item at a time, but that’s not fun if you need to change many items. And sorting just isn’t possible.

We heard you and have just released a feature that kills a few birds with one stone. (Sorry, bird lovers.)

Starting today, you can export the entirety of a collection to a CSV file, which, in turn, can be opened and edited in your favorite spreadsheet program. Make all the changes you’d like, save the result as an updated CSV file, and import the contents back into the collection. Pretty simple. (Agreed, it’s not as simple as being able to do it all natively in Headless CMS itself. Every journey begins with a first step!)

  • For bulk editing, things are really easy. When you import the updated CSV file, Headless CMS looks for the changes and applies them to your collection.
  • For sorting, after the export, you will first have to delete the contents of the collection before importing the sorted list. This is because Headless CMS ignores the order of a CSV file when modifying existing items.

Remember, you can also use the import function to add new items, whether bulk editing, sorting, or both. On the other hand, importing will not delete items. An item missing from the import is just ignored, so deletions must be made using Headless CMS.

You can read all about the new export functionality in our Help Center. You will also find details about how to delete collection contents if you’re going the sorting route - or just want to delete stuff.

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Since omitted items in the imported CSV file are ignored, and those items must be deleted manually in the Headless CMS, it would be extremely helpful, and time saving, if we could SHIFT-click for continuous items, and CONTROL(COMMAND)-click for non-continuous items to make deletions all at the same time. It is painful to have to make deletions one-by-one in HCMS.

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You’re right about the value of bulk selecting in Headless CMS for deletion. As you’ve noted, today you can only delete one item at a time or all items in a collection.

The alternative is to delete the entire collection after export so the import only involves the items you want to keep. It’s extra steps though.

Thanks, Geoff. I like your suggestion to delete all items in the collection, then import the CSV, in which case only the items remain that I want from the import. A nice clean approach.

It’s clean - but, keep in mind, you’ll have to re-import the media as well. When deleting collection items, the associated media is also deleted.