[pycsw-devel] oai-pmh deletedRecord support

[Tom Kralidis]

Hi Aleksander:

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 8:30 AM, Aleksander Vines
<aleksander.vines at nersc.no> wrote:
>
> Hi list,
>
> Are there any intentions of implementing support for deleted records in the OAI-PMH implementation?
>
> If not, is that because it would require a too heavy restructure of the rest of pycsw as csw normally does not need to concern itself with deleted records, or could it be feasible for us to implement this feature ourselves?
>
> We need support for this feature, therefore we need OAI-PMH, but if we could get csw as well by implementing it in our infrastructure with pycsw, that would be great.
>
> Kind Regards,

Correct, CSW doesn't concern itself with deleted records per se.  Some
questions:

- when looking at [1], pycsw advertises deletedRecord=no.  I'm guessing
you are looking for deletedRecord=persistent as a requirement to managing
deleted records?
- how do you envision your application deleting records?  Via CSW's Transaction
interface?  Via another workflow?

Given pycsw is not the only way into a repository, and you can orchestrate your
own application specific workflows, one option could be to add a column to the
underlying pycsw repository called, say, 'deleted' (type boolean).  Then couple
this with a repository filter filtering out deleted records for the
CSW endpoint.  This
would require multiple configs and may be messy, but in theory would work

Having said this, perhaps it's a good time to introduce a new property
into pycsw's
core model called 'status' (published/not_published/deleted), with
some configuration
on how to handle deleted records (delete forever, put in
status=deleted mode, etc.).

..Tom

[1] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#DeletedRecords