An author who opens a draft and thinks better of it had no way out — the
working-copy list could create, edit, validate and publish, and that was all.
The three delete operations existed in the contract with no implementation.
Deleting is not a cascade, which is the part worth being careful about. A
document's own rows follow it: the detail row, its tags, the relations it
points outward. But five tables reference `document` without ON DELETE CASCADE
— another document's relation target, a question's link, a project's
membership, a topic's featured list, a decision's source case — and two do the
same for `open_question`. Deleting through any of them is a foreign-key
violation, which reaches the author as a 500 that explains nothing. So the
delete checks first and refuses with DOCUMENT_IN_USE, the same refusal
TOPIC_IN_USE already makes. Quietly editing someone else's record to make room
is the worse option.
A published record is refused outright. Public pages, search and other records
link to it, and one that vanishes leaves all of them pointing at nothing —
unpublishing is the way out, and it already exists.
Case and Reference share one table split by `document_type`, so the type is
part of the lookup: without it, the Case route would happily delete a
Reference. Decisions have no delete at all, and that is the contract's
judgment rather than an omission — accept, reject and supersede record what
happened instead of erasing it.
DongHyeonka
1befdc37a4