Logical deletion (recycle bin)

The recycle bin represents a temporary storage of documents that have been deleted, but not yet permanently erased from the system. For users with dedicated rights the recycle bin allows browsing deleted items and to restore or irreversibly erase these. Documents that were deleted by mistake can be made available again to any system user as before deletion, with all the belonging access rights. The recycle bin functionality can be enabled or disabled on a per tenant basis within the system configuration so that  this feature applies to the entire ImageMaster system.

When documents are deleted (moved to the recycle bin) or restored (recovered from the recycle bin) no new revision is created and all revisions of this document are affected. Any move of documents into or from the recycle bin will be logged by the audit trail (if the audit trail is licensed and configured). Defined retention policies apply without exceptions, which means that documents with delete protection cannot be deleted and moved to the recycle bin.

The system configuration allows defining per tenant whether the recycle bin is enabled or disabled. The default setting is "enabled" and the following two methods for setting and reading this configuration option are available:

• enableRecycleBin

• isRecycleBinEnabled

If the recycle bin is enabled, the delete operation moves items to the recycle bin from where they can be restored, whereas the erase operation irreversibly removes documents from the system, so they cannot be recovered anymore.

There are dedicated permissions in the context of the recycle bin (“access”, “restore” and “erase”), which exist beside the delete permission.

If the recycle bin is disabled after being active for awhile, the recycle bin functionality (erase or restore) is still available for such documents that were moved to the recycle bin during its active time.

If the recycle bin is disabled, the delete operation has the same effect as the erase operation. In this case both operations irreversibly remove documents from the system, so they cannot be restored anymore.

Automated deletion triggered by retention rules as well as manual deletion is treated alike and the exact outcome of any “deleteDocument” operation depends on the status of the recycle bin at the time of deletion. With a disabled recylce bin, items will irreversibly erased, whereas an enabled recycle bin causes items to be moved to the recylce bin, from where they can be restored.

Documents from the recycle bin are internally managed in the system document type “_RECYCLEBIN”, where they can be accessed with the common Integration Service methods (such as “query” or “getRevision”). However, the representation of a deleted document in the recycle bin document type is serialized and therefore different from a normal document type.

The standard use case in the context of managing documents in the recycle bin is to obtain document IDs in a first step, which can then be applied as parameters in the operations “eraseDocument” or “restoreDocument” in a second step. The system document type “_RECYCLEBIN” does NOT support any of the following Web service operations. The Integration Service would reject these with an exception and an error with the code “DOCUMENT_RECYCLED”:

• createDocument/createDocuments

• deleteDocument

• deleteRevision

• checkoutRevision

• checkoutLatestRevision

• addPlan

• addPlanTemplate

• abortPlan

• removePlan

• addHold

• removeHold

• migrateRevision

• createDocumentFolderEntry