The Best Way To Implement Soft Deletes With EF Core (and why you shouldn't) 

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Soft delete is a great feature if you want to add 2-step deletion process to the user. User can recover the deleted items within a respected period of time, or can delete them permanently. In case the time of deletion has reached the recovery time threshold, the system will delete them permanently. It's like user recycle bin. You can adapt hierarchy approval to it as well. So user will soft delete the entry, but a supervisor can either approve deletion process or reject it.

Thank you, Milan. An incredibly good explanation.

10:12 a filtered index on a bool fields one only makes sense in the opposite case, when you are filtering a much smaller part. In your case, your index will cut off a couple of percent at most and will most likely be completely ignored by the base. And here are two additional things to think about when implementing a soft-delete: 1) Without additional changes hidden objects will still be taken into account when checking the uniqueness of fields by the database 2) Soft-deliting an object with cascading dependencies can lead to an invalid state of the database.

Next video, if you can, please do a video on audit trail, and how to implement it, can we use mediatr for it or not.

It is better to do this kind of thing using the SavingChanges delegate rather than overriding the SaveChangesAsync. There are multiple SaveChangesAsync overloads which internally call SaveChangesAsync(bool, CancellationToken), so you'd need to make sure you are overriding the correct one or else your logic will get skipped if a different signature is invoked, this also doesn't cover non-async calls using the SaveChanges() method, so you'd need to cover that set as well to implement this properly, finally the dispose check code runs just before that delegate is invoked, which will give you a nicer and more consistent error message if someone tried to invoke the method on a disposed instance. This also allows you to either include it in the class as you do here or attach the logic as needed.

At 4:15, why not just do "product.IsDeleted = true;" before calling "Update(product)" instead of doing that long ".Property()" call after?

Excellent video as always Milan!

I think in terms of ddd and clean architecture it would be better to use a shadow property in the EF configuration instead of modifying the domain layer

I feel like there must be a library by now for soft-deletes using EF core, right? Also Milan, what do you say about implementing ISoftDeletable using a nullable DateTime(Offset) type for the deletion marking. as this contains more information that might be useful. The filter and index would then be on: DeletedAt == null .

I find soft deletes to be invaluable, firstly it enables easier tracking of deletes for migrating changes via ETL processes to external systems and secondly users can't be trusted and soft deletes have saved many a painful situation over the years 🎉

More this simple and useful videos!

Any reason not to do some base AuditableEntity class, which would have IsDeleted, DeletedOnUtc, Id, itd for all of entites?

Nice video.

I'm new to EF Core so I have lots to learn. When you added IsDeleted you had a Migrate function do you have more details on what that is/does? Do you write that function and it's run one time to modify the database?

Could you please tell me which visual theme you use, or could you share the colors you use in your configuration, or make a video about it? Thank you very much.

Hi Milan thank you for all of your videos ! I have a question about Clean Architecture, I would to do some Business Calculations (like calculate prices), and I would like to know in what layer I should do and in what class Thank you so much ❤

Hi Milan! How would you implement cross-cutting concerns like validation or caching WITHOUT using MediatR and its pipelines? Let's say the classical service architecture. Maybe one could use a decorator pattern with Scrutor. Do you know how to implement something like this?

Found problems imlementing this on my aggregate with nested soft delete entities collections in it. Quer filters are not going to solve my problems in this case

great video, i implemented sofdelete in one project, but some questions come to my mind, what happen if i mark a isdeleted flag in one record, a producct record for taking an example, when i try to register another product with the same name like my softdelete flag and my database has a unique constraint by name? how i can manage this behavior? because i gonna have problem trying to register a new product with the same name with some product marked as softdelete

I have used temporal tables in ef core for archiving data changes before do you think that is another possible solution?

Thanks 👍

Excellent content!

what about SQL server temporal table or table with from and until date? Soft deletes + full history of the changes on the table. Very usefull when debugging what happended to your data.

How to do same things in CosmosDB with Linq?

How about not creating additional entities in the database and maintaining them by moving items, but instead simply partitioning by the IsDeleted flag? When querying with a filter, the database will more easily select from the partition where IsDeleted = false. create table if not exists products ( ... product text, isDeleted boolean ) PARTITION BY LIST (isDeleted); CREATE TABLE products_new PARTITION OF products FOR VALUES IN (false); CREATE TABLE products_deleted PARTITION OF products FOR VALUES IN (true);