How to add a unique value to a link and delete all children of a page programmatically ?

[Neo]

Hey,

I have a small niche job board that is based on ProcessWire 3.0.62 and encounter 2 problems:

1. Job pages are unpublished after a certain amount of time using a cron job and then moved as children to the "Expired Jobs" page.

Now, it is a bit annoying having to delete those old, unpublished job pages individually.

What is the best way to programmatically delete all children of the "Expired Jobs" page in one go using a protected template in the backend?

 

2. I am starting to get a problem with many similar job titles. Although, Processwire will add a number to the end of a link, when a certain job title already exists (e.g. My-Job-1, My-Job-2), this causes problems from time to time with the unpublishing process, for instance

Can't save page 1997: /expired-jobs/product-designer-2/: Chosen parent '/expired-jobs/' already has a page named 'product-designer-2'

What would be the best way to add a unique identifier to each link (e.g. combination of 6 or more random numbers and letters) to ensure unique links despite equal job titles?

 

Thanks for your feedback.

[louisstephens]

You could do the following in your template to delete pages:

$jobs = $pages->find("template=your-template, parent.name=expired-jobs");
foreach($jobs as $job) {
	//$job->trash(); this will trash the page
	$job->delete();
  }

How are you currently creating the jobs? Are you creating them from a front end form and using the api to create the new page? 

[elabx]

 

36 minutes ago, Neo said:

What would be the best way to add a unique identifier to each link (e.g. combination of 6 or more random numbers and letters) to ensure unique links despite equal job titles?

If it's worth making the update, there is a new class PageNames with methods for this purpose.

https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.111/

[Neo]

Thanks for your feedback.

Job pages are created using a front end form.

In order to trash the old jobs, I ended up with the following code:

$jobs = wire('pages')->find("template=job-template, parent=/expired-jobs/, include=unpublished");

foreach($jobs as $job) {
	$job->trash();
}

Now, regarding the problem of adding a unique value to each job link, I guess I would have to update Processwire first in order to access the PageNames and WireRandom classes?