Introducing…Deletion Management

Today we are releasing a long-requested feature for SyncHub - something we call Deletion Management.

Reporting on deleted items is trivial for most cloud platforms, because they perform something called a “soft delete” when the user removes an item from their account. Here, the item is marked as deleted and the cloud platform notifies SyncHub about the change in status.

However, some platforms perform a “hard delete”. In this scenario, the item is literally removed from their records and thus SyncHub does not get notified about its change in status (because there is no “it” to notify about).

It is this second scenario, that our new Deletion Management module caters to.

How does it work?

The issue with “hard deletes” is that (because the item literally does not exist anymore) there is nothing to query the status of. Consider:

• you have a bag of three oranges

• you take one out of the bag

• you show your bag of oranges to me

• I can see that there are two oranges. And as far as I know, there have only ever been two

But now consider that you showed me the bag before you removed an item. In this scenario, I know that there used to be three, and thus one is now missing.

In a similar way, SyncHub has an advantage that other “stateless” data managers do not have: if you have been syncing your data for a prior period of time, it knows about the presence of each item and can use this info to determine if a record is no longer available.

There are other nerdy considerations, such as API performance, retries and aligning the deletion management with your real-time sync. But you can leave that to us and just concentrate on your up-to-date and accurate data.

Getting started

This feature is free to all our users, but only available on API endpoints that we know to have hard-deleted items. To activate or adjust the frequency, simply open your Endpoint Dashboard and configure the new section, as per the animated GIF above.

Have fun!