Redmine

You can use "script/rails console".

$ RAILS_ENV=xxxx ruby script/rails console
Loading xxxx environment (Rails 3.2.17)
1.8.7-p374 :001 > p = Project.find(1)
1.8.7-p374 :002 > p.issues.count
   (0.1ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "issues" WHERE "issues"."project_id" = 1
 => 47
1.8.7-p374 :003 > p.issues.each(&:destroy)
...
1.8.7-p374 :004 > p.issues.count
   (0.1ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "issues" WHERE "issues"."project_id" = 1
 => 0

toshio harita - thanks for the comment.

would be nice to be able to do this in the UI though; Particularly making use of the filter system without having to drop down to sql.

so the case I was running earlier, subject contains <content>, category=<something>
I can do that easily in the UI, and let redmine write my sql for me.

I certainly could do this in code, but that applies to most of what I use Redmine for!

The Bulk edit menu has a "delete" button.

Felix Schäfer - yes, I realise the bulk edit menu has a delete button, but it doesn't work when you have a large number of issues selected.

It generates a URL that is too big, and that causes the webserver to balk.

(by large number, I mean 500 or more)

Mmh, I understand the problem, though I'd say the problem is not Redmine in itself in that case. Does the request timeout or cause an error right away? If it is the former, then Redmine takes too long to process all the deletions and you reach the request time limit (which AFAIK Redmine has not, so this is an issue of the app server/web server).

If the request errors right away, then the URL length is at fault indeed. I don't know that Redmine or Rails would limit that either, so your app/web server is probably the one erroring on such URL.

yup - it is a webserver limitation. Presumably, because the format for the url is
/deletestuff&id=[1,2,3,4,5....

tweaking the webserver might get you to have a different limit, but you're still going to hit a limit.

I'm suggesting using a different format (with a different button) for the case where you just want to delete everything that matches a filter

/deleteallmatchingfilter

in this case, the url doesn't need to contain 2,000 item ids - it just needs to reference the filter that produced the list, and the url length isn't an issue any more.