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Object Deletion in Reltio Platform

This topic contains information about deleting entities and relations and end-dating crosswalks.

Deletion

Entities (and relations), as well as crosswalks within an entity or relation, can be deleted. This can be done via the API or via Hub. When an entity is deleted, it is physically removed from a tenant and it cannot be restored. Any relations that were linked to that entity become immediately ineffective automatically, thus there is no need for the user or developer to worry about deleting those relations in conjunction with deleting the entity. Similarly when a crosswalk is deleted, it is no longer represented within the entity and cannot be restored. Loss of the crosswalk may cause the OV of one or more attributes to change depending on the survivorship rules set in the entity type.

End Dating a Crosswalk

A crosswalk supports a collection of dates including Create Date to capture the date the crosswalk came into existence. There is also a Delete Date which is designed to document when a source record was deleted or rendered inactive. When a record is physically deleted or marked as inactive within a source system, you can decide if it is important to retain representation of its previous presence. If you feel the source record may once again become active or if you want to retain the memory of its previous representation, you can take the approach of setting the Delete Date property of its crosswalk in the entity. The entity will immediately ignore contributions from this crosswalk for OV purposes. (If and when all crosswalks within the entity have their Delete Date populated, Reltio Platform will set the End Date of the entity, which affects the entity’s activeness as described in the Activeness topic.)
Important: The crosswalk's presence will continue to cause the record to continue to participate in matching and merging.

If retaining representation of its previous presence is not important, then a best practice is to delete the crosswalk entirely from the entity to avoid build-up of unnecessary crosswalks in your tenant. Additionally, if you wish the values contributed by the crosswalk to cease being used to attract similar values in match rules, then again this is a good reason to delete the crosswalk entirely.