What strategies can I use in Sitecore to archive items and then restore later via code?

Question

We are building a Sitecore site that will pull in some product data from an external database. On a nightly basis we will query the external database and either Add, Update or Archive/Delete/Remove product content items in Sitecore as needed. Our data template has some fields that will be populated directly from the external database (and will be read-only for content authors) and other fields that they will populate themselves. Included in our custom fields will be the SKU of the item from the external database. It is possible that over time a product could disappear from the external database. In this case we would want Sitecore to somehow remove this item from our list of products, but not completely delete it. The reason for this is that the products that have been removed could reappear in the future and we would not want to lose all of the data that had been added to other custom fields on the item. I can think of a number of different approaches for this:

1. Use Archiving/Recycling features of Sitecore. When we find that there is a product item in Sitecore that no longer appears in the external database, then we could archive it. That works well. However I can't seem to figure out a way to restore that item later if it reappears in the external database. I don't have any access to any custom fields when an item is archived (from what I have read online). So when I come across a SKU in the external database that is not in Sitecore, I have no way of figuring out if there is an archived item that has that SKU.

2. Use a custom status field on each product content item. I could set each product content item to "active" or "inactive". This would make it easy to reactivate items that reappear in the external database. However I worry about things like search and publishing. It seems messy to me to have some content items that are inactive in the folder of all products in the master database. It could be confusing to content authors and I worry that they will find their way in to the web database, etc. It seems like I would have to do a lot of custom coding to make sure that those products do not show up on any pages, etc.

3. When a product disppears from the external database I could then move those content items to a different location in Sitecore. Then when they reappear I could move them back. This also feels messy.

I just wonder if there is some better solution that I am missing. Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

I would go with option 2 "Setting status field on each product "Active" or "Inactive", as its more clear and keep the data in one place.

Additional thing to do (as suggested by Vasiliy) is to set the "Publishable" checkbox on product to "False", this way the product will disappear from web database, hence no extra filter in your search methods.

You can implement custom content editor warning to inform content editor that the current product is "inactive":

Creating Custom Content Editor warnings

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Just a thought what if you just unpublished the items that were removed from the external database and set the ones in the authoring db unpublishable until they reappear again. With this scenario, you could also have a task running archiving items that have been unpublished and not republished for a given period of time.

The best solution really depends on the number and frequency of items appearing / disappearing and the cost benefit of keeping those items in the authoring database vs. deleting them.