Features revert deletes entites

Problem/Motivation

On delete of contact_type (and possibly other) entities, RedHen mass deletes all entities of the type. This leads to two critical problems:

• Because entity delete is called as part of the Entity API implementation of the Features module feature revert operation, site admins may, unexpectedly and without warning, lose valuable data when reverting.
• When there are many records, mass deletion may trigger timeouts due to processing time required.

Proposed resolution

• Make mass deletion of entities optional and defaulting to FALSE.
• Introduce a UI checkbox to trigger mass deletion.
• Implement mass deletion using a queue operation

.

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Related Issues

Original report by @ceng

Hi,

I have a redhen_contact type (bundle) exported to a features module, my bundle is called 'member'. When I try and revert that module, I was getting enormous out of memory exceptions.

Tracing through the code, I find that on a features revert, Features calls EntityDefaultFeaturesController::revert() followed by entity_delete('redhen_contact', 'member'). This in turn calls RedhenContactTypeController::delete(array('member'));

Now, RedhenContactTypeController overrides the delete function of EntityAPIControllerExportable and decides to delete all the entities of that type. *This is not expected Drupal behaviour* as far as I can tell when a content type is deleted. The entities themselves must be left alone.

There are two reasons. Firstly, this appears to be how the popular Features module reverts an entity bundle (as described above) and so isn't really deleting anything, just restoring it to it's natural state (despite being called delete). Secondly, if you have a large number of redhen_contact instances (as my site does) it cannot delete all the entities in one go as RedhenContactTypeController::delete() is trying to do since it will run out of memory. I'd upped to 500Mb and still ran out of memory before investigating, thank goodness I did - it was trying to delete all my CRM data on a feature revert!

So what to do? I suggest removing the delete function from RedhenContactTypeController and so you probably don't need the class at all.