Mikro ORM Soft Delete

Generic soft delete solution for MikroORM.

npm i mikro-orm-soft-delete

Inspired by: mikro-orm/mikro-orm#1492 (comment)

Tutorial

Basic

It is so simple to enable soft delete with this package that you only need one example to understand what's going on:

@SoftDeletable(() => User, "deletedAt", () => new Date())
@Entity()
export class User extends BaseEntity<User, "id"> {
  @PrimaryKey()
  id: number;

  @Property({ nullable: true })
  deletedAt?: Date;
}

This means that:

• A filter with conditions { deletedAt: null } has been defined on User and enabled by default, so that those deleted entities will be filtered out by default. The filter can be disabled by:

  repo.find({ ... }, { filters: { [SOFT_DELETABLE_FILTER]: false } });
  repo.find({ ... }, { filters: false }); // if you are sure that there are no other filters enabled

• When you try to delete a User entity, it will not be actually deleted from the database, and its deletedAt property will be set to a newly instantiated Date. You can find that delete statements are replaced with update ones with MikroORM's debug mode on.

  repo.remove(user);
  await repo.flush();
  user.id !== undefined; // true
  user.deletedAt === true; // true

• cascade: [Cascade.Remove] and orphanRemoval: true still work fine with repo.remove(). But you must avoid removing items from collections when using orphanRemoval because we cannot catch the deletions caused by it.

Inheritance

If you want all your entities to be soft deletable, you can create a SoftDeletableBaseEntity and make all your other entity classes extend it:

@SoftDeletable(() => SoftDeletableBaseEntity, "deletedAt", () => new Date())
export abstract class SoftDeletableBaseEntity<
  T,
  PK extends keyof T,
> extends BaseEntity<T, PK> {
  @Property({ nullable: true })
  deletedAt?: Date;
}

Hard Deleting

Currently it's impossible to perform perfect hard deletes. As a workaround, we can hard delete entities using the native API:

em.nativeDelete(...);

Known Issues

• Deleted entities can appear in the query result in some cases