Delete 2000 posts with the same subject (description)

Hi Jim,

This is definitely possible using our REST API. To do this I would start by using the Export Search Results API to search for the ticket IDs to be deleted based on the ticket subject.

Here's an example of what that might look like in Javascript:

const SUBDOMAIN = "YOUR SUBDOMAIN";
const TICKET_SUBJECT = "YOUR TICKET SUBJECT";

const retrieveCursorPaginatedResults = async (url) => {
   const data = await fetch(url).then((response) => response.json());
   let results = data.results;
   if (data.meta.has_more) {
      results = results.concat(
         await retrieveCursorPaginatedResults(data.links.next)
      );
   }
   return results;
};

const retrieveTicketIdsBySubject = async (subdomain, subject) => {
   const results = await retrieveCursorPaginatedResults(
      `https://${subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/search/export?query=subject:"${subject}"&filter[type]=ticket&page[size]=1000`
   );
   const ticketIds = results.map((result) => result.id);
   return ticketIds;
};

retrieveTicketIdsBySubject(SUBDOMAIN, TICKET_SUBJECT).then((tickets) => {
console.log(tickets);
});

 

You can then leverage the Bulk Delete Tickets API to delete those tickets to delete the tickets in batches of 100 in the background.

 

You could use a function like this to delete the tickets with the ticket IDs you have exported from the search:

const deleteTickets = async (subdomain, ticketIds) => {
   while (ticketIds.length > 0) {
      const batch = ticketIds.splice(0, 100).toString();
      console.log(`Tickets to be deleted: ${batch}`);
      const url = `https://${subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/destroy_many?ids=${batch}`;
      const jobStatus = await fetch(url, { method:"DELETE" }).then((response) =>
         response.json()
      );
      console.log(jobStatus);
   }
};

 

Hope this helps!