Properties can't be deleted
Summary: Currently, deletion of Properties is disabled in the UI. (And, now that I look at the code, forbidden in the back end.) This is unfortunate, since it tends to cause dead Properties to stack up.
(Reported by Alexx, who was trying unsuccessfully to delete a Property in the Alpha Sandbox, and thought that this meant that Members couldn't delete things.)
Alexx: Actually, I can delete Things, I just can't delete Properties.
Justin: Yeah, now that I think about this, I'm remembering that this was a deliberate, if temporary, decision.
The thing is, deleting Properties is freaking dangerous. Since Things are largely made up of Properties, deleting a Property means that any Things that use that Property are immediately broken. At the moment, that breakage is likely to be pretty damned serious, to the point of throwing internal exceptions. While Querki gives you a lot of latitude, I don't want it to be easy to get your Space into a truly broken state, so for now I'm being conservative.
So in the near term, if you have a Property that is in the way, I recommend changing its Name and Display Name to something innocuous; that should free up the namespace, so that it isn't too inconvenient.
In the longer term, the game plan is likely to be something like this, in order:
- Provide a way to see all the Things that use a Property.
- Allow deletion of a Property iff there is nothing using it.
- Provide a mass-remove for a Property, which takes it off of all Things.
- Create a concept of "Property Transformation", which is what you most often really want -- let you change a Property's Collection or Type. This will probably only be possible across certain transformations, and will require confirmation if you do something that will lose data (like transforming a List into an Optional), but we should be able to build some infrastructure to allow many sensible transformations.
None of this is likely to happen soon, but if folks are finding this to be a particular pain point, please speak up...
