[jamesvandyne]

author here. You’ve hit the nail on the head.

We actually have soft delete in Kwoosh. We’re using Django on the backend. The way we went about implementing it was with a flag on our core data-type (Apps, Screens, Discussions, Tasks etc... all share a common parent class). Then we used an custom Manager class (Django’s name for the bit that lets you set default filters for models) that sets the default filter to only show active items.

If we want to query all objects including archived items (like for viewing them as read-only) we just change our code from Task.objects.filter() to Task.all_objects.filter().

We also have another flag for controlling visibility directly. This makes it manageable to remove a parent task, hide the children tasks, and restore into the expected states.

I should write a more in depth post on this for workshop. Maybe someone would find it helpful.