For various reasons, you may want to avoid deleting objects from your database.

This Django application provides a model mixin, that allows you to transparently retrieve or delete your objects, without having them deleted from your database.

You can choose what happens when you delete an object :

• it can be masked from your database (soft delete)
• it can be normally deleted (hard delete)
• it can be hard-deleted, but if its deletion would delete other objects, it will only be masked
• it can be never deleted or masked from your database (no delete, use with caution)

# Models

# We create a new mixin, with the given policy : Objects will be hard-deleted, or soft deleted if other objects would have been deleted too.
SafeDeleteMixin = safedelete_mixin_factory(HARD_DELETE_NOCASCADE)

class Article(SafeDeleteMixin):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Order(SafeDeleteMixin):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    articles = models.ManyToManyField(Article)


# Example of use

>>> article1 = Article(name='article1')
>>> article1.save()

>>> article2 = Article(name='article2')
>>> article2.save()

>>> order = Order(name='order')
>>> order.save()
>>> order.articles.add(article1)

# This article will be masked, but not deleted from the database as it is still referenced in an order.
>>> article1.delete()

# This article will be deleted from the database.
>>> article2.delete()

• Branch 0.2.x is compatible with django >= 1.2
• Branch 0.3.x is compatible with django >= 1.4

Current branch (0.3.x) has been tested with :

• Django 1.4, using python 2.6 and 2.7.
• Django 1.5 and 1.6, using python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x.
• Django 1.7 using python 2.7 and python 3.x.
• Django 1.8 using python 2.7 and python 3.x.
• Django 1.9 using python 2.7 and python 3.x.

Installing from pypi (using pip). :

pip install django-safedelete

Installing from github. :

pip install -e git://github.com/makinacorpus/django-safedelete.git#egg=django-safedelete

The application doesn't have any special requirement.

The documentation is available here.

Please see the LICENSE file.

Please see the AUTHORS file.