How to get the last x number of splistitems changed for a SPWeb

Question

I'm trying to pull back the last x number of list items in all non-hidden lists for a given web.

My original code would go through all lists and run the following code:

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
query.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name =\"Modified\" Ascending=\"FALSE\"/></OrderBy>";
query.RowLimit = (uint)this.ItemsToDisplay;

switch(list.BaseType)
{
    case SPBaseType.DocumentLibrary:
        query.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"Recursive\"";
        break;
    default:

        break;
}

SPListItemCollection listItems = list.GetItems(query);

effectively getting the last x items modified from each list and then I would put all of them into a List and sort, then taking the bottom x items.

This code was really slow (sometimes taking 20-30 seconds) so I decided to go down the route of using the ChangeLog.

Now i'm doing this code:

SPChangeQuery query = new SPChangeQuery(false, false);
query.Item = true;
query.Delete = false;
query.Add = true;
query.Update = true;
query.ChangeTokenStart = new SPChangeToken(SPChangeCollection.CollectionScope.Web, Web.ID, DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime().AddDays(-14));
query.ChangeTokenEnd = new SPChangeToken(SPChangeCollection.CollectionScope.Web, Web.ID, DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime());

SPChangeCollection changes = Web.GetChanges(query);

which works well in dev but has issues in prod. It turns out that in prod since we run MOSS and profiles are synced, I get 1000's of changes that are occuring in the user information list. So right now since the GetChanges method only pulls items in chunks of 1000, i have to use the lastchangetoken and call getchanges several times and then sort through 1000's of items just to get at the one's I want.

First question: Does anyone know how to exclude hidden lists or certain lists from a SPChangeQuery?

Second question: Is there a faster / better way of doing this? I thought about using Auditing to get the data since I have that turned on for all of our site collections but I haven't gone down that path yet.

Thanks.

Answer 1

SPListItems is not included in auditlog (per design due to performance issues) so you cant use auditing if you are looking for list items.

I would probably go for SPSiteDataQuery (as you mention yourself) which usually performs best for site-wide queries.

Another option would be the GetListItems web service which often i surprisingly fast...

A third option would be ProcessBatchData using the Display method, if it can be tweaked to deliver the data you need.

Answer 2

Could you do it at a more granular level using SPList.GetChanges()? Obviously you'd have to do some merging of resultsets, but you'd probably be working with fewer overall change items. I guess a big factor would be how many lists you have, as this would be tied to how many merge operations your code would have to do..