Sitecore: Can't select a component to delete

Question

Sorry for the newbish question, but I was kind of thrown into this project. Here's the situation: The content developers are new to Sitecore and created several different copies of a component without any content in them (new content item for each). These extra components render on the page and show up in Preview mode, but are completely collapsed (virtually invisible/unselectable) in Edit mode, so we don't know how to select them to delete them.

We're currently working in Experience Editor, but we're open to whatever is the best method of viewing the full list of components on a page.

In Experience Editor, I can pull up the tree and select the parent placeholder, but don't know how to drill down to children components. Is there an easy way to do that?

In Content Editor, will deleting the content item also delete the component on the page? Is there any way to look at a content item and see what pages it appears on to make sure we're looking at the right content item?

Again, sorry for the very basic question. I did search around the site and didn't find anything, but that may be due to me just not using the right terminology. Thanks!

Answer 1

The easiest way to achieve what you want is to go to the content editor, navigate to your item and in the presentation tab click on "Details" (2nd button from the left normally). This will open a new window with the presentation details. Go to the "final layout". Now you should see the list of your layout and all sublayouts and renderings on the page (for the "Default" device). Click on "edit" (red link). This will open another window called "device editor". On the left, select "controls" and you will get the list of all your controls on the page. Here you can select and remove them.

ps: normally it is a good idea to make your controls always selectable in the experience editor (e.g. by giving them a default height when empty). That would prevent this situation.