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Soft Delete

Soft delete marks an entity as deleted instead of removing it physically from the database. Soft-deleted entities are excluded from all read operations, so they behave as if they were gone, but the data is retained.

Enabling soft delete​

Soft delete is opt-in per repository via the RepositoryOptions attribute:

IUserRepository.cs
using Wemogy.Infrastructure.Database.Core.Abstractions;
using Wemogy.Infrastructure.Database.Core.Attributes;

[RepositoryOptions(enableSoftDelete: true)]
public interface IUserRepository : IDatabaseRepository<User>
{
}

The entity needs a bool property marked with the [SoftDeleteFlag] attribute, which stores the deletion state. Entities derived from EntityBase already provide an IsDeleted property with this attribute:

public abstract class EntityBase : IEntityBase
{
    [SoftDeleteFlag]
    public bool IsDeleted { get; set; }

    // ...
}

Behavior​

When soft delete is enabled:

  • DeleteAsync sets the soft-delete flag instead of physically removing the entity.
  • All read operations (GetAsync, QueryAsync, GetAllAsync, IterateAsync, CountAsync, ...) automatically exclude soft-deleted entities.
  • GetAsync throws a NotFoundErrorException for an entity that has been soft-deleted, exactly as if it did not exist.
await userRepository.DeleteAsync(user.Id, user.TenantId);

// throws NotFoundErrorException because the entity is soft-deleted
await userRepository.GetAsync(user.Id, user.TenantId);
info

When soft delete is disabled, DeleteAsync removes the entity physically and read operations return every entity regardless of the soft-delete flag.