Context

Our product owner has realized that some entities are duplicated from time to time and that a merge is required. This should clean up existing duplicates and also allow special users to merge entities in the future.

The merge process is defined as follows (this should be done atomically):

• identify "to be merged" and "main" entities
• archive "to be merged" information
• parent most of the children of "to be merged" to "main"
• write some archiving metadata (who, when etc.)
• remove "to be merged" (with cascade)

The entity is rather used as it has a couple of dozens of other entities referencing it (foreign keys).

Dilemma

I am wondering how to proceed about this as I see two main options.

Entity Framework approach

• add all archive related models in the database context
• easily archive data by mapping existing models to archive ones
• all changes are done in a context transaction

Pros: rather easy to implement

Cons: bloats the context with archive related models (add a dozen models that have very similar names to the operational ones and might create confusion when having to work with DbSet related to these).

SQL approach

Create a stored procedure to tackle the archiving.

Pros: avoid bloating the context and app with archiving functionality

Cons: use SQL stored procedure which is harder to write and maintain.

Another way is to create another database context for archiving stuff, share the connection string and explicitly handle the transaction.

I am wondering if there is any best practice for such functionality.

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Alexei‭

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