Remove a Page from the Sitecore xDB (Sitecore 8 Technical Preview)

Note: Information in this post is based on the Sitecore 7.5 and 8 Technical Previews and is subject to change.

Here's a quick one. I've been doing some JMeter traffic generation on my xDB for a forthcoming post/video on the Path Analyzer, and to push data from session to the xDB quickly, I implemented an "end session" page to hit at the end of each test thread.

(I will hopefully also get a chance to share my work in JMeter, but in the mean time you should start where I started, with Martina Welander's awesome post.)

Unfortunately the first time around I forgot to exclude my /EndSession.aspx from analytics, so it was muddying my data. However it was pretty easy to directly remove this from the xDB using a mongodb query.

Basically, I'm telling mongodb to update documents in the the Interactions collection and remove elements from the Pages array where the URL path is /EndSession.aspx. The final "true" argument tells mongodb to update all documents which match the query (the empty first argument in this case), not just the first it finds. For more info on what's going on here, check the mongodb documentation on the update() method.

After running this, I had to rebuild the sitecore_analytics_index using the Indexing Manager and rebuilt the reporting database using /sitecore/admin/RebuildReportingDB.aspx.

This query was used on a Sitecore 8 xDB but based on the Sitecore 7.5 xDB Technical Preview, would work with 7.5 as well.

- Nick / techphoria414