Deleted Collections are still referenced by Party records

[mike-jones]

When a Collection record is deleted, it's relationships with other records are not removed (they should be). The steps listed below relate to related Party records, though I suspect the same would be true for Activity and Service records.

Steps to re-create the issue:

1. Create a Collection in ReDBox
2. In the 'People' tab enter a Party and make them a CI
3. Progress the Collection through to be published
4. Check the Party details page in the Mint
5. The Collection should appear in the related objects field
6. Delete the Collection
7. Check the Party details page in the Mint again
8. The deleted Collection is still present

[UoA tracking reference: DACO-69]

[dedickinson]

This is good to note but I'd like to add a comment across the use case. As one important aspect of ReDBox/Mint is to publish information publicly, there's a real concern around deleting records. Once published, others may link to your record and, by deleting it, this distributed set of links breaks down. Whilst you can manage the deletion locally, it's trickier for external records.

In ReDBox we provide the option to retire records and this feeds into OAI as a delete. Perhaps the record should actually continue to be published with information indicating that the record is no longer maintained. This is often referred to as "tombstoned" and is likely to be important on records using DOIs (see Section 4.4 of http://datacite.org/sites/default/files/Business_Models_Principles_v1.0.pdf)

Perhaps an optional housekeeping script could be created to clean up broken relationships or maybe we need a procedure around setting records to be tombstoned rather than retired.

From my point of view this needs discussion across the user community (so is a good issue) but don't believe it should be a core process, enabled by default.