Question

I'm writing a plug-in that needs to query information for discussion topics linked to a particular case and wanted to add a condition to exclude deleted discussion topics.

Seems like it should be simple to do, but I am not seeing the logic for how to determine from the table which topics are actually deleted.

I started out by trying ixPersonDeletedBy==0, but quickly realized that although this value is set to a non-zero value when a post is deleted, it isn't reset back to zero after you UNDELETE the post. The UI seems to know which are deleted regardless of whether ixPersonDeletedBy has a value or not, but I am just not seeing where it is figuring this out.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It appears that deleting/undeleting a post in a Discussion Group changes its associated ixArea (see the Area table).

For deleted postings the ixArea in the DiscussTopic table will match up with sArea of "Spam - Discussion Group..." in the Area table while undeleted postings will match up with "NonSpam - Discussion Group...".

You might also be able to use the nType field in the Area table -- I notice it's always set to 3 for items marked as Spam (deleted).