Question

In my current project, we got a rather unusual request(to me). The client wants all the deletion procedure to mark a flag instead of physically delete the record from the database table. It looks pretty easy at the first glance. I just have change

public void DeleteRecord(Record record)
{ 
    record.DeleteAndFlush();
}

public IList GetAllRecords()
{
    Record.FindAll().ToList();
}

To

public void DeleteRecord(Record record)
{ 
   record.Deleted = true;
   record.UpdateAndFlush();
}

public IList GetAllRecords()
{
    Record.FindAll().Where(x=>x.Deleted==false).ToList();
} 

But as after I get a bit of time and think though again. I found that this little change would cause a huge problem in my cascade settings. As I am pretty new to the Active Record business. I wouldn’t trust myself to simply change all the CascaeEnum.Delete to CascadeEnum.SaveUpdate. So, I am looking some input here.

1) Is the mark a flag instead of physical requirement a common one?

2) If the answer to question 1 is Yes, then I believe there is something built-in in NHibernate to handle this. Can someone tell me what is the right approach for this kind of problem?

Thanks for your input.

Answer 1

This is known as Soft Deletes and it is very common. There is some debate about the best practice – check out this recent blog post: http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/08/30/avoid-soft-deletes.aspx