I want to keep child records and the hierarchy, even when the parent is deleted. I see two options:
- Keep the existing parent and utilize a "deleted_at" field to indicate the parent itself is inactive, but the relationship still exists. This will lead to a number of effectively dead parent records being stored forever. Meh.
- Assign all abandoned child records to a generic "collector" zombie parent record. I prefer this, but then you lose the history to the original source of the child record.
I don't have the Rails experience to see ahead as to which of these 2 would be the most advisable path to take, or maybe there's an altogether different solution.
SO is telling me this appears to be a subjective question and they may close it. I hope not, because I'm sure this is a question that others have as well.