On Thursday 20 July 2006 12:26, Dries Buytaert wrote:
Why don't we add a status-field with two states -- STATUS_ACTIVE and STATUS_DELETED -- to each of the database tables with records that want to take advantage of the trashbin functionality? Then, the trashbin patch might be a lot easier to grok -- and from an architectural point of view, less awkward. It wouldn't be particularly clever but that is OK: it is super-easy so there is no point being clever to begin with. I'd like to see us explore this path instead.
Plus, this has a number of advantages. Most of all, we'd still able to query deleted data. For example, the filter form on the administer content page (?q=admin/content) would allow us to access delete nodes and we'd be able to use advanced query methods like 'show all deleted nodes from user Joe with the taxonomy term 'Apple'. That is, we get to reuse a lot of the existing UIs and modules.
While I've done the "timestamp as deleted flag" trick before myself and it's worked well, it does have one notable drawback: It becomes opt-out. Adding a "Deleted" column to node, comment, and various other tables means that every query against those tables would have to be modified to add "WHERE deleted=0". Between core and contrib, that's thousands of queries that would need to be updated. Granted, the update is smaller than, say, the Forms API conversion, which also broke everything in one fell swoop. But that was replacing one method of doing X with a different, better method of doing X. Once the transition is/was complete, there's not an unreasonably larger amount of work to do (IMHO) than before. However, a deleted flag column would essentially mean 99% of all entity queries (node, comment, user) from now on would have to remember to check "WHERE deleted=0". Do we really want to introduce that extra step? I'm not giving this thumbs up or down, just pointing out that there are more costs involved in such a mechanism than tweaking a few queries in the patch. -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson