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Soft Delete Patterns

How Gauzy implements soft deletes to preserve data integrity.

Overview​

Instead of permanently deleting records, Gauzy marks them as inactive/archived:

@MultiORMEntity("employee")
export class Employee extends TenantOrganizationBaseEntity {
  @MultiORMColumn({ default: true })
  isActive: boolean;

  @MultiORMColumn({ default: false })
  isArchived: boolean;

  @DeleteDateColumn()
  deletedAt?: Date;
}

Soft Delete Behavior​

Implementation​

Service Layer​

// Soft delete - sets deletedAt timestamp
async softDelete(id: string): Promise<void> {
  await this.repository.softDelete(id);
}

// Restore soft-deleted entity
async restore(id: string): Promise<void> {
  await this.repository.restore(id);
}

// Hard delete (permanent)
async hardDelete(id: string): Promise<void> {
  await this.repository.delete(id);
}

Querying (Excluding Deleted)​

TypeORM's @DeleteDateColumn automatically filters soft-deleted records:

// This automatically excludes soft-deleted records
const employees = await this.repository.find();

// To include soft-deleted records
const all = await this.repository.find({ withDeleted: true });

// To find only soft-deleted records
const deleted = await this.repository
  .createQueryBuilder("e")
  .withDeleted()
  .where("e.deletedAt IS NOT NULL")
  .getMany();