Record versioning on delete CASCADE

[Felipe Meirelles]

The cascade feature should work for record versioning enabled tables?

Thanks.

[Massimo Di Pierro]

When using versioning. Latest versions of records are never deleted, only filtered out. I think cascade should work as expected.

[Felipe Meirelles]

No, I mean, when a record is "delete" aka is_active is seted to False, the other records there make reference to it are seted false too?

[Massimo Di Pierro]

Good point. No. they are not set to is_active=False. Should they?

[Felipe Meirelles]

I think they should, to be compatible with the default behaviour. Is this possible to do?

[Massimo Di Pierro]

It is possible but very very inefficient since it would not be handled at the database level.

[Massimo Di Pierro]

I should explain my answer. In order to have record versioning, record must be copied. To have a cascade delete we would have to loop and copy each individual record. Those records themselves could have references. More looping. etc. This are even more complex since there may be non-trivial circular references.

[Felipe Meirelles]

Good point. But in my point of view you wont use record versioning at all your tables, just in the ones that have sensitive data. And yet, you dont use ondelete cascade in all tables too... I still think record versioning should have this standard behaviour.