ForceDeleteList (stsadmin)

On this edition of “SharePoint 2007 The Hard Way…”

I had a custom action that I created in the Edit Control Block set up to add a list to a list. Well, we couldn’t leave well enough alone and all of our WSP files are being combined into one big WSP. It is a long story as to why that is, but suffice it to say it has to do with interdependencies of WSPs that becomes a problem. You can set dependencies in the feature file by adding an “ActivationDepency” to your feature.xml file to force the admin to install features in a certain order, but there isn’t something to enforce the order of removal: stuff just fails. Well, when you start having 20+ *.wsp files flying around, it gets kind of sketchy.

Anyway, long story short, I goofed and forgot to delete a list instance before I deactivated the site and site collection features and retracted/removed the solution from Central Admin. So, I tried SWAT but it didn’t have rights, so I decided to try and remove the list using my old “go-to,” STSAdmin. Now, I love STSAdmin, but I don’t like doing stuff from the command line (if that makes any sense.) And I have a print-out that I keep beside me that is basically a pipe to a text file of the screen dump you get from typing “stsadm /?”. On that list is “forcedeletelist.” But, if you type in “stsadm -help forcedeletelist,” it gives you “stsadm -o forcedeleteweb -url http://web.” Now in the original printout, I didn’t even see that was an option: forcedeleteweb.

Just so you know, if you type in “stsadm -o forcedeletelist -url http://web” it works fine, and doesn’t delete your web. That is, I haven’t tried it on the root of the site, but on “http://mysite/Lists/MyListName.” It did not delete the folder in the 12 hive or any of the sites within, but it deleted that pesky list from my site.