Comments on: 3 Plugins for Safer ActiveRecord Deletions

By: Garry Tan

Garry Tan — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:13:52 +0000

Acts as paranoid doesn't work properly as of Rails 2.1.2 (the last known working version that I have in production is with Rails 2.1.0)

The problem in 2.1.2 is that something must have changed in the rails code to cause deleted items to appear again in associations. I'm in the process of ripping out Acts as Paranoid now. It should not be used at all and should probably be deprecated entirely with strong warnings to avoid use.

By: jerome

jerome — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:12:33 +0000

@marcel: just use recover! class method with acts_as_paranoid

By: grosser

grosser — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:54:27 +0000

1 and 2 should be easy, but 3 could get hard when your data is out of date...

By: Marcel

Marcel — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:58:19 +0000

Thanks for the write-up! However, could you (or anyone else who has experience with these plugins) tell me something about the ease of restoring data from the three aforementioned mechanisms?

Keeping a backup of AR-data is one thing, but how do you restore this data when needed and how much effort does it take?

By: grosser

grosser — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:43:20 +0000

Thanks for the comparison, i always wondered if there are other aproaches out there.

Imo soft-deleteable is superior to paranoid, the little extra migration overhead is worth it...

Trashable seems nice, but when the user is too old recovery could get hard (rows missing/validations failing) but keeping the deleted childs seems promissing...

By: Jan

Jan — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:09:24 +0000

It would be nice if you can tell the reason why acts_as_paranoid won't work well with latest Rails.

By: Josh N. Abbott

Josh N. Abbott — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:04:45 +0000

Thanks for the post! I've been looking for a neat little write-up like this.

-- Josh