ADR 0004 - Soft deletion

Status

Accepted

Context

We have users and objects, and everything is tied together. Deleting something may cause some problems, like deleting other things in cascade, or losing some relatioship, like not knowing who is the author of a video.

Decision

We don’t want things to be deleted, instead we’ll keep them in the database in a “deleted” state, so that they won’t show up anywhere.

Looking at the ` Safe/Soft/Logical deletion/trashing and restoration/undeletion <https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/deletion/>`_ page on djangopackages, we can make a choice with these constraints:

• support for python 3 and django 2
• simple, not over-featured
• can manage relationships
• supports the django admin
• is maintained

Regarding this, we choose django-safedelete which proposes many options to handle deletion, and so will fit our needs.

Consequences

If the correct deletion options are used, depending on the relationships, we won’t lose data.

No new code to write to handle soft-deletion.

As a cons: one more dependency, but it seems maintained so it should be ok.