Deletion¶

Technically, any item can be deleted. However, the permission system restricts the deletion of items to users with the appropriate delete permission.

Upon deletion:

The item is flagged deleted in the database
The deletion event is recorded on the item (i.e. the 3 following properties are added to the item description: deleted: <true/false>, deleted_date: <date>, deleted_by: <user>)
The item is hidden from standard list views & dropdowns
When this item was linked to an other item, the link is preserved and the deleted item remain visible on the detail page of their linked counterpart.

Any deleted item can be recovered in the future.

Note about deletion in previous release

Only permanent deletion of items (deletion without recovery, a.k.a "hard-delete") used to be suppoerted in previous releases. This behavior has now changed in favor of "soft deletion" (item deletion with possible recovery).

To delete an item, use the trash button available on list or detail pages

Other useful flags to be considered¶

Certain item have other useful property flags. These flags should be considered prior to deletion, as in certain situation an item should remain visible (therefore not deleted) but flagged as not usable. For example:

Consumables have an avalability status as well as a maintained flag. You may want to flag a given item unavailable or unmaintained instead of deleting it
Dataset have a QC flag. When the data is of poor quality, it should be flagged as so. Once this is done, you may or may not want to delete it.

Data management: Special considerations for data records¶

While deletion works the same for all items, data records - i.e. records describing physical files - come with additional considerations.

Understanding item deletion vs. removal of physical files

LabID distinguishes between two operations for data records:

Deletion: Works as described above - marks a record as deleted in the database while preserving the underlying files on disk. The record itself can be recovered (undeleted) at any moment.
Removal: An additional operation, occuring only for data records, that permanently erases the physical data files from disk

When deleting a dataset or a datafile, LabID will typically prompt you for explicit confirmation about whether to also remove the associated files from disk.

For detailed instructions on dataset management, please refer to the data management deletion & removal section.