Hi

Right now I am working on a project and we are using hibernate. Our company policies don't allow doing a "hard delete" and we only use logical delete.

Logical delete works like this. We have a flag on every table called is_deleted, then we map it to hibernate via yes_no type and what we are doing is the following:
-When a user deletes a record we updated is logical delete to false
-Every select or fetch to the database uses as a restrictions the logical delete to only bring "real data".

What I was wondering is if any of you know how can we automate this process...

How can we change hibernate to allow us to change the behavior of delete and get?

It would be a nice feature to add to hibernate a parameter in the mapping and tell what column is the logical delete so we can then hibernate normally.

In every financial or government related or money related project I have been working we don't use real deletes to the DB.

If anyone knows a way around in hibernate to implement this behavior I would greatly appreciate it

And post your opinions or comments about this!!!

Both requests (change what delete does, and only retrieve not-deleted rows) can be implemented using hibernate's event system. You'll need to implement a standard interface across all deletable objects so that in your even handlers you can cast your object to it, allowing you to access the isDeleted and setDeleted attributes.

You can also use DB triggers to handle the deleting part of things.

The onDelete event handling might be tricky (haven't really thought about it), so an alternative would be to write your own session object, which would wrap/delegate to a real session object. All methods would pass straight through to the real session, except for delete. That would check instanceof LogicalDeletable (or whatever), if false drop through to real delete, otherwise call setDeleted(true) then update that object.

Has anyone else taken a whack at this? I'm in the middle of implementing something similar at the moment.

The largest issue (to me) is how to deal with cascading the delete down into the collection changes.

If I implement a listener for DeleteEvent, I can only change the event being triggered for the entire object graph from delete to update.

If I implement a listener for PreDeleteEvent, vetoing the delete operation means processing the graph stops.

Any ideas on how to cascade the logical delete down thru?

FYI for anyone else who is implementing this in their application...

I ended up having to hook into the hibernate meta-data and manage this on my own..

pseudocode....


this is definitely a hack but there doesn't appear to be a way to soft delete and still cascasde that delete down thru collections. it would be very nice to have a way of doing this at a finer level with the event architecture (if anyone out there is listening). i would think many applications have a business requirement for this type of functionality.

I just wanted to throw my name out there as another person who's interested in this as well.

Many big companies, like the one I work for, have a no-delete policy in place and force you to implement using a deleted_flag column on a table. As adoption of hibernate goes into the mainstream this will become more and more of an issue.

For example, imagine a place like Amazon.com trying to use hibernate. I imagine they don't delete any data as it's all very sensitive customer data.

Anyone from the hibernate team watching this thread?

Anybody posted this as a feature request in JIRA?

Is there any news about this feature?