Django Soft Delete

This is a set of small classes to make soft deletion of objects.
Use the abstract model SoftDeleteModel for adding two new fields:

• is_deleted - is a boolean field, shows weather of a deletion state of object
• deleted_at - is a DateTimeField, serves a timestamp of deletion.

Also, you can use SoftDeleteManager and DeletedManager object managers for getting alive and deleted objects accordingly.

By default, the SoftDeleteModel has objects attribute as SoftDeleteManager and deleted_objects attribute as DeletedManager.

How to use

pip install django-soft-delete

Add the SoftDeleteModel as a parent for your model:

# For regular model
from django.db import models
from django_softdelete.models import SoftDeleteModel

class Article(SoftDeleteModel):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    
    # Following fields will be added automatically
    # is_deleted
    # deleted_at
    
    # Following managers will be added automatically
    # objects = SoftDeleteManager()
    # deleted_objects = DeletedManager()
    # global_objects = GlobalManager()


# For inherited model
from django_softdelete.models import SoftDeleteModel

class Post(SoftDeleteModel, SomeParentModelClass):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

Make and apply the migrations:

./manage.py makemigrations
./manage.py migrate

Relations

You can also use soft deletion for models that are related to others. This library does not interfere with standard Django functionality. This means that you can also use cascading delete, but remember that soft delete only works with the SoftDeleteModel classes. If you delete an instance of the parent model and use cascading delete, then the instances of the child model will be hard-deleted. To prevent hard deletion in this case, you should use SoftDeleteModel for child models in the same way as for parent model.

Quick example

a1 = Article.objects.create(title='django')
a2 = Article.objects.create(title='python')
a3 = Article.objects.create(title='django_softdelete')
Article.objects.count()  # 3

a1.delete()  # soft deletion of object
Article.objects.count()  # 2

deleted_a1 = Article.deleted_objects.first()  # <Article: 'django'>
deleted_a1.restore()  # restores deleted object
Article.objects.count()  # 3
Article.deleted_objects.count()  # 0

a1.hard_delete()  # deletes the object at all.

Batch deletion

Article.objects.filter(some_value=True).delete()  # soft delete for all filtered objects
Article.deleted_objects.filter(some_value=True).restore()  # restore for all filtered objects

Custom manager

If you need a soft delete functionality for model with your own object manager, you want to extend it with the SoftDeleteManager.

from django_softdelete.models import SoftDeleteManager

class YourOwnManager(SoftDeleteManager):
    pass

The same class exists for the deleted_objects manager too -- DeletedManager.

Custom QuerySet

If you need to use soft delete functionality for your custom QuerySet, use the SoftDeleteQuerySet as a parent class or extending existing one.

from django_softdelete.models import SoftDeleteQuerySet

class YourOwnQuerySet(SoftDeleteQuerySet):
    pass