familienarchiv/docs/adr/025-canonical-import-and-single-migration-schema-foundation.md

# ADR-025 — Canonical Import Output as Contract & Single-Migration Schema Foundation

**Date:** 2026-05-27
**Status:** Accepted
**Issue:** #671 (schema, decisions 1–2); #669 (importer architecture, decision 3)
**Milestone:** Handling the Unknowns — honest uncertainty in dates & people

---

## Context

The "Handling the Unknowns" milestone introduces honest uncertainty into the archive:
documents whose dates are known only approximately or as a range, and people the importer
infers from raw attribution text but cannot confidently identify. Three sibling issues —
date precision (#666), name triage (#665), and the importer (#669) — each independently
planned a Flyway `V69` migration that altered `persons`. Three `V69`s is a boot failure
(Flyway versions must be unique), and `persons.provisional` was at risk of being defined
twice.

Two durable decisions had to be made before any application code in Phases 3–6 could
compile against the new schema.

---

## Decision

### 1. All import/precision/attribution/identity schema lives in ONE migration with a single owner

`V69__import_precision_attribution_identity_schema.sql` adds every new column for this
milestone in a single, atomic, forward-only migration:

- `documents`: `meta_date_precision` (backfilled `DAY` where dated / `UNKNOWN` where not,
  then `NOT NULL`), `meta_date_end`, `meta_date_raw`, `sender_text`, `receiver_text`.
- `persons`: `source_ref` (unique index, nullable), `provisional` (`NOT NULL DEFAULT false`).
- `tag`: `source_ref` (unique index, nullable).

Integrity is pushed to the database as fail-closed `CHECK` constraints (the precedent is
`V22`'s `person_type` allowlist):

- `meta_date_precision` must be one of the seven enum values.
- `meta_date_end` may be non-null **only** when precision = `RANGE` (one-directional, not
  biconditional — see Consequences).
- `meta_date_end >= meta_date` for ranges with both endpoints (a `CHECK`, not a trigger).
- `meta_date_raw`, `sender_text`, `receiver_text` are length-capped at 10 000 (mirrors the
  `transcription_blocks` cap in `V18`).

No sibling issue adds another migration that alters `persons` or `documents` in this
milestone.

### 2. The backend `DatePrecision` enum is a verbatim mirror of the normalizer's `Precision`; the canonical output is the contract

The importer reads the Python normalizer's canonical output
(`tools/import-normalizer/`). The backend `DatePrecision` enum
(`DAY, MONTH, SEASON, YEAR, RANGE, APPROX, UNKNOWN`) is a verbatim copy of the normalizer's
`Precision(StrEnum)` (`dates.py`). There is **no translation layer**: the normalizer's
output strings are persisted as-is. The same applies to `source_ref`, which carries the
normalizer's `person_id` / canonical `tag_path` unchanged as the re-import idempotency key.

### 3. The importer is four idempotent loaders over the canonical artifacts; Java no longer parses the raw spreadsheet (Phase 3, #669)

The legacy `MassImportService` read the *raw* original spreadsheet by positional column
index (`@Value app.import.col.*`) and re-derived everything in Java (ISO-only date parsing,
name classification via `findOrCreateByAlias`, an ODS/XXE XML path). It is **deleted**.

The rebuild is a `CanonicalImportOrchestrator` driving four single-responsibility loaders in
an explicit dependency DAG — `TagTreeImporter` → `PersonRegisterImporter` →
`PersonTreeImporter` → `DocumentImporter` — that **consume the committed canonical artifacts**
(`tools/import-normalizer/out/`). A shared `CanonicalSheetReader` maps columns **by header
name** (not by index) and fails closed (`IMPORT_ARTIFACT_INVALID`) on a missing header. Each
loader calls the **owning domain's service**, never a repository (layering rule); the tree
loader uses `RelationshipService`, never the relationship repository.

Settled sub-decisions:

- **Idempotency precedence is domain-specific.** Persons/tags upsert by `source_ref`,
  documents by `index`. Two distinct rules apply:
  - **Person/Tag scalar fields = preserve human edits.** On re-import a non-blank field a human
    changed in-app is never overwritten (blank fields are filled from canonical via the single
    `preferHuman` idiom), and `provisional` is monotonic-downward — once a human confirms a
    person (`false`) it never reverts to `true`. Because the orchestrator loads the register and
    tree *before* documents, a person already `false` can never be flipped provisional by a
    later document row that references the same `source_ref`, regardless of document-row order.
  - **Document sender/receivers/tags = canonical-authoritative.** A document's sender, receiver
    set, and tag set are owned by the canonical row, not the archivist. On re-import of a
    PLACEHOLDER document `DocumentImporter` clears and re-populates `receivers`/`tags` so a row
    whose set *shrinks* prunes the removed links rather than accumulating stale ones. The
    "preserve human edits" rule above does **not** extend to these collections. The raw
    `sender_text`/`receiver_text` cells are always retained verbatim (a separate invariant).
    Note non-PLACEHOLDER documents are skipped entirely (`ALREADY_EXISTS`), so once a document
    has a file the importer never touches it again — this bounds the authoritative-overwrite
    blast radius to placeholder rows.
  Verified against real Postgres in `CanonicalImportIntegrationTest`
  (`reimport_preservesHumanEditedPersonField`, `reimport_prunesRemovedReceiverAndTag…`,
  `import_neverFlipsRegisterPersonToProvisional…`).
- **Name policy = Option A.** The normalizer resolved attribution upstream: the document sheet
  carries the resolved slug in `sender_person_id` / `receiver_person_ids` and the raw cell in
  `sender_name` / `receiver_names`. The importer routes register-first by `source_ref`
  (provisional `Person` when a slug is unmatched), and **always retains the raw cell** in
  `sender_text` / `receiver_text` even when a person is linked — the load-bearing invariant
  behind the merge story. A row with no slug but raw text (prose / `?` / object-noise) links
  no person and keeps only the raw text.
- **`provisional` is now populated.** Importer-minted persons are `provisional = true`;
  register and tree persons stay `false`. This is the Phase-3 contract the schema (decision 1)
  left at default-`false`.
- **Security guards are defense-in-depth, not upstream-trust.** The `file` column is treated as
  hostile (CWE-22 does not care it came from our tool): its basename is validated
  (`isValidImportFilename` — slash/backslash, three Unicode slash homoglyphs, `..`, null byte,
  absolute path) and resolved only inside the import dir with canonical-path containment, so a
  traversal value can never escape. The `%PDF` magic-byte check gates upload. These guards and
  their tests were ported from `MassImportService` **before** it was deleted.

---

## Consequences

- **RANGE is one-directional, not biconditional.** A `RANGE` row may have a null
  `meta_date_end` (an open-ended range with only a start), because the normalizer can emit
  start-only ranges. A biconditional `RANGE ⟺ end IS NOT NULL` rule would reject valid
  normalizer output, so it was rejected. Phase 4 rendering must handle a `RANGE` with no end
  gracefully.
- **`provisional` stays `false` throughout this phase.** The column and flag exist, but no
  code path sets it `true`; the importer (Phase 3) is the only writer. This is intentional,
  not a half-built feature.
- **A future dev must not "improve" the enum.** Renaming or dropping a `DatePrecision` value
  without changing the normalizer silently breaks import idempotency and date rendering. The
  enum's Javadoc states this; the DB `CHECK` enforces validity independent of the Java enum.
- **`source_ref` is unique + nullable.** Manually created persons/tags have `source_ref =
  NULL`; Postgres allows multiple NULLs under a plain unique index, so no backfill is needed.
- **Forward-only.** The migration is immutable once shipped (Flyway checksum model); any fix
  goes in a later version. There is no down-migration — rollback means restoring from the
  nightly `pg_dump`, the standard procedure.
- **`runImport()` is non-transactional — per-loader transactions only.** The orchestrator
  does not wrap the four loaders in a single transaction; each loader (or the per-call
  `upsertBySourceRef` / `DocumentImporter.load`) carries its own `@Transactional` boundary. A
  partial failure mid-run (e.g. the document loader throws after tags + persons committed)
  leaves the earlier loaders' data committed and the `ImportStatus` set to `FAILED`. This is
  acceptable precisely because the import is idempotent: re-running is safe and converges to
  the same state, so the operational recovery for a partial failure is simply to fix the
  offending artifact and re-trigger the import — no manual cleanup of half-written data is
  required. A future maintainer must not assume all-or-nothing semantics.
- **`PersonSummaryDTO` coupling.** `provisional` was added to the `PersonSummaryDTO` native
  interface projection; because the projection is backed by native SQL, the column had to be
  added to all three native `SELECT`s (`findAllWithDocumentCount`, `searchWithDocumentCount`,
  `findTopByDocumentCount`) or it would silently return `false`. Guarded by integration tests
  against real Postgres.