Remove orphaned (dangling) entity references when an entity is deleted

Created on 9 June 2018, over 6 years ago

Updated 4 August 2023, about 1 year ago

Entity reference field items are not removed when the referenced entity is deleted.

E.g.

Create taxonomy term with tid 123 "trees".
Create node "pine" with nid 456 tagged with "trees".
Delete the "trees" term. Nid 456 will still be related to tid 123 even though there is no longer such a term.

Mostly this isn't a problem. Some examples where it can cause problems:

Search facets with an incorrect count of results.
Cryptic error messages when editing entities that contain collapsed Paragraphs.
Null fields in GraphQL results (which is invalid GraphQL).
Acquia's Cohesion product (see "Why is my Cohesion layout table so large" which points to this issue)

There are scenarios where dangling references shouldn't be automatically cleaned up (if you need a human, or some other system to take action).
It's a performance challenge. There may be tens of thousands (or more) dangling references to clean up.

In interactive scenarios - like the entity delete confirm form - ask the editor if they want to delete the orphaned references:

In a non-interactive environment (PHP API, REST API) always use the second option.

New radio group on the entity delete confirmation form (and bulk operations confirm form too?).

TBD

None

🐛 Bug report

Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

Entity →

Last updated about 5 hours ago

Created by

🇵🇱Poland blazey

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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

Comment about 1 year ago →
🇳🇿New Zealand xurizaemon Ōtepoti, Aotearoa 🏝
Acquia docs link to this issue as the cause of surprisingly large DB tables belonging to their Cohesion system.. On a site I looked at there were 63K nodes, 75K node revisions, and the table cohesion_layout_revision was 630MB in size. (This was larger than the entire Drupal codebase and the remainder of the site DB put together.)

Adding Acquia's Cohesion table to the "examples of this problem" list in ID.
Comment about 1 year ago →
🇬🇧United Kingdom joachim
I made a contrib module that takes care of deleting references: https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_reference_delete →

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