Support a entity delete policy

Hi,

Thanks for the proposal.

But entity deletion is out of the scope of Entity Share, I think it can be done in another contrib project but may be too business relative to provide a generic solution.

The problem is for referenced entities imported with the main pulled entities. Entities could be referenced from anywhere, so how to decide if an entity should be deleted or not? If it is still used somewhere else you could get missing references and break other contents.

About the user interface changes, I am more in favor of solution b) a new dedicated form.

This makes me think of the following similar issue ✨ Unpublish already imported entities that are no more in the server channel Needs work .

Could that be an option? Whether to delete the references or not? And if the reference was used else where would it not be reimported ie on the next cron?

I don't see why not. My concern is that entity_import_status does not track the reference in a meaningful way. So in order to do this (whether in a different contrib module or not) we would need to:

• Figure out which references are attached to the deleted entity
• Figure out if any other entities reference that entity (should it only count published?)
• Perhaps add some metadata to the import status so it is clear what the current status is

There are several conditions that will make this not-so-straightforward, especially for some of the more advanced plugins like entities embedded in a wysiwyg instead of populating a reference field. I don't have confidence that unpublishing or deleting references will be 100% reliable, perhaps things would have to be more deliberately configured.

This could also be a feature we're interested in, need to discuss with the client. I think the combination of the configurable policy idea here and the work that was done in ✨ Support a entity delete policy Active .

I agree that referenced entities are a bit more challenging, but I think updating them is already limited in a similar way, they are only updated if a referenced entity is updated I assume? In other words, the "it's not 100% reliably so we can't support delete" argument could also be applied to updating referenced entities or referenced entities in general :)

The existing changes in that other issue do a query on the last update flag, if we combine that with a server lookup then it could be combined with an update-or-delete check on both "channeled" and referenced entities. FWIW, in our project, referenced entities is likely not a major concern, so I expect we could also live with a version that just does channeled entities.

Also, the extra modules that have server -> client notifications to trigger updates could probably add support for deletes as well, or really just trigger it like any other update and the client will then figure out that it's gone.

I had a look at updating ✨ Unpublish already imported entities that are no more in the server channel Needs work , and while I made some progress and making it configurable on that level is fairly easy (that's a cron setting there now, not import policy), I did run into some issues, notably reliably detecting when an entity really isn't around anymore when you use the SkipImported plugin which I guess everyone with a decent amount of shared entities does.

A really scalable solution would probably require a special server-side resource (maybe a custom entity type, then we have jsonapi integration for free?) that listens on entity hooks of channeled and/or configurable entity types, and creates a track record for that. the client could then fetch (recent) entries in that resource and delete them locally. I suppose that could be a separate optional module but you'd again need two of those, a server and a client.

Alternatively, I guess something could also be built on top of https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_share_websub → , with a special notification, but that then relies on the fact that all such notifications are reliably distributed.

Evaluating my options with my client now.

I did implement a custom solution now with an entity type to track deletions, posted relevant parts of that in ✨ Unpublish already imported entities that are no more in the server channel Needs work (wanted to do it here, got a bit confused with the issues)