Soft Deletes Verses Real Deletes When Doing CRUD Interactions

I happened to stumble across a blog post today by Phil Haack with the title "Death to confirmation dialogs with jquery.undoable." In it, Phil explained how he was inspired to write his plugin by seeing how his Netflix queue allowed him to "undo" the deletion of an item from the queue. As he said in his post:

"Notice that there’s no confirmation dialog that I’m most likely to ignore questioning my intent requiring me to take yet one more action to remove the movie. No, the movie is removed immediately from my queue just as I requested. I love it when software does what I tell it to do and doesn’t second guess me!"

His post got my attention because I'm currently in the middle of designing a scaffolding/code generation system, specifically to output pages for performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) tasks, and it's currently designed so that when the user clicks on a "delete" link for a record (and Javascript is enabled), I make the user confirm their decision via a customizable dialog box (via the jqModal jQuery plugin) before proceeding with the deletion.

So I got to thinking about what would be involved in doing what he was suggesting: allowing the user to "delete" a record without confirmation as long as they had the option of undoing that action while still on the page.

I put "delete" in quotation marks because such a process would almost certainly involve making the delete a "soft" delete: marking/tagging the record as being deleted but not actually deleting the underlying database record. Undoing an actual deletion would be much harder, given that you would lose the unique record id in the deletion in addtion to the rest of the record data. I suppose you could potentially store the data from the record client-side (in the page) so the "undo" record could recreate the record from scratch, but that would be a pain and might not be feasible in every scenario. Undoing a soft delete/changing the delete flag in the record, on the other hand, would be pretty easy.

But if I went the soft delete routine, then the question would become: how do those records get deleted for real? I tend to design my web applications with a long term view, and I don't want the application database tables to fill up with deleted records over a number of years. My clients typically only have access to the database tables via the application itself, so leaving that up to them is not an option. So I would either have to given them another page/tool in the web application (perhaps a tool restricted to a tech-savvy few) to actually remove the deleted records, or perhaps run a scheduled task to remove those database records that have been marked for deletion for a year or more.

After some consideration, my current inclination is to stay with my current confirmation dialog/deletion routine. In most of my applications, the CRUD interactions are reserved for the administrative users of the application, who typically know when it's appropriate to delete a record. And the need to delete a record via the CRUD tools provided is usually rare, so having a confirmation dialog come up for each instance isn't too much of an annoyance.

But I'd be curious to hear other people's thoughts on this topic.