familienarchiv/docs/adr/032-person-delete-db-level-integrity.md

ADR-032 — Person-delete referential integrity lives in the database, and the cascade never reaches documents

Date: 2026-06-06 Status: Accepted Issue: #684 (move person-delete FK detach to database-level ON DELETE) Milestone: —

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Context

Deleting a Person had to detach the two FKs into persons that lacked any ON DELETE behaviour: documents.sender_id and document_receivers.person_id (both from V1). PersonService.deletePerson and mergePersons did this in Java — nulling the sender and deleting receiver join rows before deleteById — so the integrity guarantee lived in application code. Any other delete path (a future endpoint, a manual psql, a batch job) could still orphan rows or fail with an FK-violation 500.

A related soft reference made it worse: transcription_block_mentioned_persons.person_id was a UUID column with no FK (V56, a deliberate "no FK" choice), so a person delete left dangling @-mention rows. The literal @DisplayName lives in transcription_blocks.text, so only the link was ever at stake — not the visible name.

Decision

Move person-delete integrity into the database (migration V71) and thin the service to a plain deleteById:

• documents.sender_id → ON DELETE SET NULL (documents.senderText preserves the raw textual attribution, so nulling the link loses no historical record).
• document_receivers.person_id → ON DELETE CASCADE (the symmetric completion of V14, which gave the document_id side the same).
• transcription_block_mentioned_persons.person_id → a real FK with ON DELETE CASCADE, reversing V56's "no FK" decision. The read renderer already degrades a @DisplayName with no sidecar row to plain escaped text, so removing the link is invisible to the reader.

Cascade-boundary invariant: the cascade stays strictly at the join/reference layer and never reaches documents rows — a cascade into documents would destroy historical letters. This is pinned by a non-negotiable document-survival assertion in PersonRepositoryTest.

Consequences

• A person delete is safe from every path, not just PersonService. The service and merge stay thin (deleteById + the cascade); reassignSenderToNull and deleteReceiverReferences are deleted.
• This fixes the pre-existing dead-link-on-deleted-person case — it is not a purely invisible refactor.
• DB cascades run below AuditService, so the row-level cleanup is intentionally not audit-logged; the person-delete action itself is still logged at the service layer.
• The V71 FK validation requires cleaning pre-existing orphan mention rows first; the migration does this in a DO block that logs the purge count via RAISE NOTICE.

Alternatives considered

• Keep integrity in Java — rejected; it only protects the one code path and re-breaks the moment a second delete path appears.
• Cascade documents.sender_id — rejected; it would delete historical letters when a sender is removed. SET NULL keeps the letter and its senderText.
• Leave the mention sidecar FK-less (honour V56) — rejected; the "no FK" rationale was stale, the name survives in the block text regardless, and the FK removes the orphan-row class of bug.