django-tombstones

Unintrusive soft-delete for django.

An example admin screen for a soft-deletable model:

Design decisions

1. Only works for models that have a primary key of type UUID

2. Does not change the behaviour of Model.delete. Instead adds soft_delete and soft_undelete methods to model instances.

3. Does not care about cascading. If you soft-delete an object that has related objects, those related objects are untouched.

4. The soft-deletion state of a model is stored in a generic tombstones table, so each model is not cluttered with any extra deleted attribute. This means:

   • Making a model soft-deletable does not require database changes to that model's table.
   • When using django-rest-framework model serializers, there is no need to worry about some deleted attribute appearing.
   • When querying soft-deletable models, an extra join to the tombstone table is made.

Requirements

• Python: 3.4 and over
• Django: 1.8 or 1.10 and over

Usage

Add tombstones to your INSTALLED_APPS, together with the contenttypes app that comes with django (it's most likely already an installed app):

INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'tombstones.apps.TombstoneConfig',
)

For every model where you want soft-delete, you should inherit from SoftDeleteModel:

class MyModel(SoftDeleteModel):
    ...

You should also use the soft-delete-aware ModelAdmin, and configure it:

@admin.register(MyModel)
class MyModelAdmin(SoftDeleteModelAdmin):
    list_filter = [SoftDeletedListFilter]             # Hides soft-deleted objects by default, and gives the option to show all objects.
    list_display = [..., 'soft_delete_button']        # Adds a column on the admin list with a button to delete/undelete the object
    readonly_fields = [..., 'soft_delete_button']     # Adds a button on the detail list to delete/undelete the object
    ...

References

• https://github.com/scoursen/django-softdelete was an inspiration