mugle-dev team mailing list archive

[Matt Giuca <matt.giuca@xxxxxxxxx>]

I think removals should always cascade down, but not up. (The "not up" means
you still need to carefully delete down-references).

For example, deleting a Game should delete all of its GameVersions, but
deleting a GameVersion should not delete the Game, so you need to remove the
GameVersion reference from the Game.

Having said that, there need to be things that you simply cannot delete,
because there is too much valuable data in them that you don't control. I
don't think you should be able to delete a Game if it has any UGPs in it.

So let's look at all the objects and their deletion policy:

   - Achievement -- Cascading delete all UserAchievements
   - DevTeam -- Cascading delete all Games; observing the Game delete
   restriction
   - User -- Cascading delete all UserGameProfiles
   - Game -- Cascading delete all GameVersions, PromotedGames; cannot delete
   if there are any associated UserGameProfiles
   - GameVersion -- Cascading delete all GameFiles
   - GameFile -- Cascading delete all GameFileContents *if* they are not
   referenced by another GameFile
   - GameFileContents -- Cannot delete if there are any associated GameFiles
   - PromotedGame -- OK
   - UserGameProfile -- Cascading delete all UserAchievements, KeyValuePairs
   - UserAchievement -- OK
   - KeyValuePair -- OK

Note that even though you can't really delete DevTeams (pretty much any
devteam that has published a game), you can still remove users or take users
out of devteams, so that provides the necessary indirection to have a user
disassociate with a game but keep the game alive.

Also I think administrators should be able to override the Game delete
restriction and actually delete a game and all associated UGPs.

Does the above sound reasonable? Now I don't think deletes are really that
important. What is more important is *disassociation*. For example, if I
have a user in a devteam and I want to remove the user from that devteam --
it isn't particularly important whether the devteam is deleted or not, I
just want to disassociate the user from the devteam. Besides, if I can
disasassociate a user from a devteam, an admin can safely delete the DevTeam
object in the datastore.