Soft Deletes in Marten

Yet more content on new features in Marten leading up to the 1.0 release coming soon. These posts aren’t getting many reads, but they’ll be stuck in Google/Bing for later users, so expect a couple more of these.

As part of the 1.0 release work, Marten gained the capability last week (>0.9.8) to support the concept of “soft deletes.” Instead of just deleting a document completely out of the database, a soft delete would just mark a “deleted” column in the database table to denote that the row is now obsolete. The value of a “soft delete” is simply that you don’t lose any data from the historic record. The downsides are now you’ve got more rows cluttering up your database and you probably need to filter out deleted documents from your queries.

To see this in action, let’s first configure a document type in Marten as soft deleted:

    var store = DocumentStore.For(_ =>
    {
        _.Connection(ConnectionSource.ConnectionString);
        _.Schema.For<User>().SoftDeleted();
    });

By default, Marten does a hard delete of the row, so you’ll need to explicitly opt into soft deletes per document type. There is also a [SoftDeleted] attribute in Marten that you could use to decorate a document type to specify that it should be soft deleted.

When a document type is soft deleted, Marten adds a couple extra fields to the document storage table in the database called “mt_deleted” and “mt_deleted_at” just to track whether and when a document was deleted.

In usage, it’s transparent to the user that you’re doing a soft delete instead of a hard delete:

    // Create a new User document
    var user = new User();
    session.Store(user);
    session.SaveChanges();

    // Mark it deleted
    session.Delete(user);
    session.SaveChanges();

As I said earlier, one of your challenges is to filter out deleted documents in queries. Fortunately, Marten has you covered. As the following acceptance test from Marten shows, deleted documents are automatically filtered out of the Linq query results:

    [Fact]
    public void query_soft_deleted_docs()
    {
        var user1 = new User { UserName = "foo" };
        var user2 = new User { UserName = "bar" };
        var user3 = new User { UserName = "baz" };
        var user4 = new User { UserName = "jack" };

        using (var session = theStore.OpenSession())
        {
            session.Store(user1, user2, user3, user4);
            session.SaveChanges();

            // Deleting 'bar' and 'baz'
            session.DeleteWhere<User>(x => x.UserName.StartsWith("b"));
            session.SaveChanges();

            // no where clause, deleted docs should be filtered out
            session.Query<User>().OrderBy(x => x.UserName).Select(x => x.UserName)
                .ToList().ShouldHaveTheSameElementsAs("foo", "jack");

            var sql = session.Query<User>().OrderBy(x => x.UserName).Select(x => x.UserName).ToCommand().CommandText;
                _output.WriteLine(sql);

            // with a where clause
                session.Query<User>().Where(x => x.UserName != "jack")
                .ToList().Single().UserName.ShouldBe("foo");
        }
    }

Easy peasy. Of course you may want to query against the deleted documents or against all the documents. Marten’s got you covered there too, you can use these two custom Linq extensions in Marten to include deleted documents:

1. “IDocumentSession.Query<T>().MaybeDeleted()…” will include all documents in the query, regardless of whether or not they have been deleted

2. “IDocumentSession.Query<T>().IsDeleted()…” will only include documents marked as deleted