deleting a site through node/1234/delete then confirming doesn't delete the site in the same was as clicking "delete" [#1468064]

Hi,

I wanted to delete a site, and did not see the "delete" button for some reason, so I just typed in the URL node/1234/delete, and confirmed. The result is that the site node was deleted from the Drupal Aegir site, but no delete task was created as normally happens, the result being that my site is still active but I can't access it through the Aegir GUI because the node is gone.

Suggestions: either hijack node/1234/delete or, ideally, intercept a delete call and create a delete task.

Cheers,

Albert.

Comments

Comment #1

dman commented 4 March 2012 at 21:49

Suggestion : WDDTT.
:-) A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Yes that button is hidden sometimes. The trick is to "stop" the site before you can "delete" it.

Perhaps if the GUI had its unavailable buttons there, but disabled (with a mouseover explanation) it would be an acceptable UI?

You can also get yourself into this pickle by using the admin/content/node screen to delete stuff. Which is handy as I've used it to kill some zombie tasks and neither-alive-nor-dead sites that failed validations (and failed to produce a failure notice)

Comment #2

alberto56 commented 4 March 2012 at 22:46

Side note: to recover from this, one can verify the platform, which re-imports the sites into the front-end.

Comment #3

anarcat commented 5 March 2012 at 15:28

Component:	Code	» Documentation
Category:	bug	» support

The idea of /delete is *exactly* that it doesn't create a delete task. In fact, in your case, if it would have created a delete task, the site node would have still been there (otherwise how does the task know which site to delete?), and you would have had the same problem as directly running the delete task.

The fact that this menu item is hidden is on purpose, to avoid people from removing the site without running the proper delete task. The fact that it can still be ran is to work around issues with site deletion which still happen however how hard we try to fix them.

So until the delete task never fails (and I doubt this will happen in the short term), I think this is the proper way of doing things. If anything this needs better documentation. I expected this to be in the FAQ, but it's not, see http://community.aegirproject.org/faq#I_tried_to_create_a_site_but_the_c...

Comment #4

alberto56 commented 5 March 2012 at 15:48

Thanks @anarcat for the explanation.

Perhaps if the GUI had its unavailable buttons there, but disabled (with a mouseover explanation) it would be an acceptable UI?

That would have helped me, but I think it might be confusing for most users to have a delete task and a disabled delete button which do two different things. Perhaps a warning might be good on the confirmation screen for those users who, like me, type in node/12345/delete, and/or a drupal_set_message() when mass-deleting sites on the admin page, just saying something like "Notice: you are about to delete the node associated with site example.com, not the site itself. Please use the delete task to delete the site; you can verify the platform to recreate accidentally deleted sites".

Cheers,

Albert.