In my Sitecore PowerShell Extensions presentation at the Sitecore User Group Conference 2014, I demonstrated how simple it is to make bulk Item updates — perform the same update to multiple Sitecore items — using a simple PowerShell script, and thought I would write down what I had shown.

Sadly, I do not remember which script I had shared with the audience — the scratchpad text file I referenced during my presentation contains multiple scripts for making bulk updates to Items (if you attended my talk, and remember exactly what I had shown, please drop a comment).

Since I cannot recall which script I had shown — please forgive me 😉 — let’s look at the following PowerShell script (this might be the script I had shown):

@(Get-Item .) + (Get-ChildItem -r .) | ForEach-Object { Expand-Token $_ }

This script grabs the context Item — this is denoted by a period — within the PowerShell ISE via the Get-Item command, and puts it into an array so that we can concatenate it with an array of all of its descendants — this is returned by the Get-ChildItem command with the -r parameter (r stands for recursive). The script then iterates over all Items in the resulting array, passes each to the Expand-Token command — this command is offered “out of the box” in Sitecore PowerShell Extensions — which expands tokens in every field on the Item.

Let’s see this in action!

My home Item has some tokens in its Title field:

One of its descendants also has tokens in its Title field:

I opened up the PowerShell ISE, wrote my script, and executed:

As you can see, the tokens on the home Item were expanded:

They were also expanded on the home Item’s descendant:

If you have any thoughts or questions on this, please share in a comment.