How to force delete Sanity documents that have references in bulk?

No, you cannot override or force delete documents that have strong references from other documents. This is by design for referential integrity protection in Sanity.

However, you have several options to handle this situation:

1. Use Weak References (Schema Change)

If you want to allow deletion regardless of references, you can modify your schema to use weak references by adding weak: true:

{
  name: 'someField',
  type: 'reference',
  to: [{type: 'work'}],
  weak: true  // Allows deletion even if referenced
}

Important: Just changing this property won't automatically update existing references in your data store.

2. Delete Only Unreferenced Documents

You can filter your query to only delete documents that don't have incoming references:

const posts = await client.fetch(`
  *[_type == 'work' && count(*[references(^._id)]) == 0][0...500]
  { title, _id, _rev }
`)

3. Identify Which Documents Are Blocking Deletion

To see which documents are preventing deletion, catch the error and query for referencing documents:

posts.forEach((post) => {
  queue.add(() => 
    client
      .delete(post._id)
      .catch((err) => {
        console.error('Delete failed: ', err.message)
        client.fetch('*[references($id)]._id', { id: post._id })
          .then((results) => {
            console.log('The following documents reference this document:')
            results.forEach((id) => console.log('  ', id))
          })
      })
  )
})

4. Delete References First

The proper approach is to delete or update the documents that reference your target documents first, then delete the target documents themselves.

Why There's No Force Delete

The strong reference protection is intentional—it prevents orphaned references and maintains data integrity in your content lake. If you truly need to bulk delete documents with references, you'll need to handle the referencing documents first, either by:

• Deleting them
• Updating them to remove the references
• Converting the references to weak references

If you're trying to roll back mutations (as mentioned in the linked discussion), consider using the unset operation to remove specific fields rather than deleting entire documents.