Returning deleted item content

[drnextgis]

While working on #323, I considered adding support for a callback in the delete_item method https://github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi-pgstac/blob/main/stac_fastapi/pgstac/transactions.py#L179 that could be triggered on the deleted STAC item. However, I realized that in pgstac, the delete_item function

pgstac/src/pgstac/sql/003a_items.sql

Line 292 in 6c569c0

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION delete_item(_id text, _collection text DEFAULT NULL) RETURNS VOID AS $$

is defined with RETURNS VOID, which means the content of the deleted item isn't available on the client side. The idea was to pass the item's content to a callback that could handle the removal of any underlying assets. Since delete_item in pgstac is always executed on a single item, it doesn't seem like a significant overhead to return the content of the removed item. What are your thoughts on this?

[vincentsarago]

Is that a regular pattern in API design that delete method return the deleted API?

Thinking about #323 I was maybe thinking about adding callback methods on all the transactional methods. While the Callback would be a SQL methods (so it could not delete the asset directly, it could maybe create a Table with all the assets to be deleted and then this table would be used by a Cron that would delete the asset) 🤷

I'm just expressing my personal opinion, maybe David will agree about returning the Item :-)

[bitner]

I actually originally did return the deleted item, but the spec (at least as it existed then) had the return as void. It'd definitely be super easy to return the item, but if it's against the spec, I'd be inclined to do it as a separate function.