向我的网站添加存档功能

Question

I'm trying to add post archiving to my website and give users the opportunity to archive any post they need. My website is built with MERN and a RESTful api.

1. My first thought was to add a section in my Post model like this:

{ archived: { type: Boolean, default: false } }

Where users select "archive" on the front end and a request is sent to the server which switches that model instance/post to archived: true. Then, the all posts page should only display unarchived posts. But, I don't know how efficient it would be or if it is a decent option.

Answer 1

In databases, this is often called "soft-delete", and many systems do it - blogs hide outdated articles, on-line stores use it to hide products which are no longer offered, and so on. It's a standard industry practice.

Usually, you'll use the field to filter out posts when listing them. At this point, you must make an important decision:

• Do you completely hide the "archived" articles and pretend they don't exist at all (404)? Or...
• Do you hide them from listings only, but still keep references by _id functional, so that users' browser bookmarks continue to work?
• Or maybe your website should have a separate section for "archived" posts that's still browsable?

Once you've decided that, you will know which queries to modify in order to include the extra condition.

When it comes to performance, assuming your site has only a handful of posts (say, up to 1000), it will not matter at all - the bottleneck will usually be sorting, so make sure you have all the proper indexes (say, on a date field - see Mongo docs on indexing if in doubt).

If you're going to have huge numbers of posts (in the millions), and the archived posts become a significant fraction of all posts (say, 50%), then you could use partial indexes to speed up queries - the index can hold only non-archival posts, with the archived posts thrown out of the index to save on index size (traversal time + RAM). Don't worry about this too soon, however - such optimizations may never be necessary on most sites.