[4.x]: Delete For Site behavior for multi-site entries is inconsistent (hard-/soft-deletion)

[michaelrog]

What happened?

The Delete For Site behavior appears to be inconsistent with respect to soft-/hard-deletion:

• If I delete an entry that is only enabled in one site, the entry is soft-deleted and appears in Trashed.
• If I delete a multi-site-enabled entry that is currently only active on one site, the entry is soft-deleted and appears in Trashed.
• If I delete a multi-site-enabled entry that is currently active on multiple sites, the entry (for that site) is hard-deleted and cannot be restored.

This behavior is confusing; It feels like a bug.

As a content editor, I would expect that, if soft-deletes are enabled for entries, an entry I delete from a site should be recoverable from Trashed, no matter how many sites it's active in at the time of deletion.

Steps to reproduce

1. Accidentally Delete-For-Site an entry that is only enabled in one site. See that you can restore the entry from Trashed.
2. Accidentally Delete-For-Site an entry that is enabled in multiple sites. See that it's irrecoverably gone. Cry. 😢

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Craft CMS 4.5.3
PHP 8.1.20
MySQL 8.0

[michaelrog]

(Apologies, this should have been tagged craft4. Although I suspect the same issue affects craft3, too.) 😬

[i-just]

Hi, thanks for getting in touch!

Deleting an entry for a site when that entry exists for other sites doesn’t go through the same delete mechanism as in other cases. When you delete a multi-site element for just one site, it still exists for the other sites. That’s why it behaves differently.

We'll discuss this one internally and I'll get back to you once I have an update.

[brandonkelly]

Yeah this is currently working as intended, and it would take some schema changes to make this possible. Going to close, but feel free to open up a discussion requesting soft deletion for site-specific entry content.