Doctrine SoftDelete OneToOne Relationship

Question

I have these entities on my code.

class Review extends BaseEntity {

    /** @ORM\OneToOne(targetEntity="Action", mappedBy="review") */
    protected $action;
}


class Action extends BaseEntity {

    /** @ORM\OneToOne(targetEntity="Review", inversedBy="action") */
    protected $review;
}

As you can see it's a OneToOne relationship between Action and Review. My problem is I use soft-delete for my entities as well, so when I delete an entity is not actually removed only a deletion date is set. Later in audit trail I need to show deleted reviews and I also need information from the parent action of course. My question is, do I need to make this relationship OneToMany? or is there a better approach?

Answer 1

To be honest i'm not very found of the soft-delete behaviour. What you need to be aware is that soft-deleting an entity is a strong compromise in a relational database.

You may want to consider in this particular instance an event sourcing approach. I would recommend to store the information about the deletion and the (soft)deleted entity in a document based DB.

Any other approach (like OneToMany ) is still fine but keep in mind that the risk here is degrading your relation by introducing a incoherent relationship.

That being said I'm fully aware that real life it's quite different than theory :) good luck.

Regards.