In reading order.
Hard deletes destroy the audit trail; soft deletes clutter live tables forever. Introducing ArchiveKit, a .NET library that intercepts deletions and stores immutable archive snapshots with TTL policies and cascade archiving.
The anatomy of ArchiveKit's SaveChangesInterceptor - detecting soft-deleted entities in the change tracker, building archive rows with zero extra database reads, and the one line of state-flip ordering that keeps EF from cascade-deleting the archive you just wrote. Part 2 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
Why ArchiveKit's inline archive limit defaults to exactly 14, how EF Core's MaxBatchSize turns archiving into arithmetic, and an honest inventory of every deletion path the interceptor cannot see - synchronous saves, ExecuteDelete, and raw SQL. Part 3 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
The storage design behind ArchiveKit - typed queryable columns and a jsonb payload from a single write, why the archive's EntityId is an index but deliberately not a foreign key, and the reflective model configuration that builds every archive table from one method call. Part 4 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
How ArchiveKit wires itself up - the [Archivable] attribute's three knobs, an assembly scanner that fails fast at startup instead of quietly at delete time, the static registry behind every lookup, and the AddArchiveKit configuration surface. Plus an honest note about the source generator that doesn't exist yet. Part 5 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
Correlation ids and cascade archiving in ArchiveKit - how one Guid per save turns scattered archive rows into a reconstructable object graph, why cascade happens through the EF change tracker rather than the database, and two honest limits: a naive root heuristic and a CascadeArchive flag the interceptor doesn't read yet. Part 6 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
ArchiveKit's snapshot service assembles a full JSON tree of a deleted object graph using nothing but archive rows - the primary data is already gone. Job tickets, a four-state machine, retries with a terminal Failed state, and the single-table assembly limitation I still owe a fix for. Part 7 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
Retention as a first-class column: how ArchiveKit stamps ExpiresAt at archive time from a TtlDays attribute, hard-deletes expired rows in bounded batches, and runs the whole thing on Lambda with the hosted services switched off. Also, the rows TTL doesn't clean yet. Part 8 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
The read side of archive-on-delete: querying archives through promoted typed columns, digging into jsonb payloads for everything else, polling snapshots with a 202 pattern, and an honest accounting of the restore path ArchiveKit doesn't have yet. Part 9 wraps up the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
