projectblacklight
Feature: Ability to delete an item from an exhibit
Problem being solved
Admins and curators currently lack the ability to fully remove items from an exhibit via the Spotlight admin UI. This becomes a bigger issue when items need to be taken down urgently - for example, in response to rights or privacy concerns.
At Harvard, resources are often harvested into exhibits via OAI, and we need a way to remove those records from both Solr and MySQL. This also applies to uploaded items, which may still have file remnants or references in the database even after being “removed” from view.
This lack of deletion control is further complicated by the fact that items may be shared across exhibits, depending on how ingest is configured.
Feature details
Provide functionality in the Spotlight admin UI to:
- Delete uploaded and harvested resources
- Remove from Solr index
- Delete uploaded files
- Remove from MySQL and any persistent storage
- Include clear warnings or controls if the item is linked to other exhibits.
Acceptance criteria
- Admin can delete an uploaded or harvested item via UI, and the item is:
- Removed from Solr
- Files are deleted
- Record is deleted from MySQL
- UI presents a clear warning if an item is used in multiple exhibits, with an option to cancel or confirm scoped deletion
- Action is logged or auditable (for accountability or debugging)
- Functionality is accessible to Spotlight admins and possibly curators
This needs to be approached very carefully. It's possible for references to items to exist in widgets embedded on pages in various ways, etc. (we should track down all possible references) and we need to consider what happens when these references break or how to cleanly remove them.
I have reservations about granting this ability to anyone other than admins. A curator might not be aware of the consequences of removing an item that is used in another exhibit. (Or we need to handle removing everywhere vs removing from an exhibit as two different cases.)
