Proposal 0021: an expansion's generated rows do not outlive their master - #41
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delchev wants to merge 1 commit into
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Proposal 0021: an expansion's generated rows do not outlive their master#41delchev wants to merge 1 commit into
delchev wants to merge 1 commit into
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expansions binds the master's create and update, and says nothing about its delete - so the rows it generated are the one part of a record that survives it, still pointing at an id that no longer resolves and still counted by every roll-up, report and balance that counted them while the record existed. Referential integrity is not the missing half: where it is enforced the delete is refused instead, which leaves the author with rows they never entered and no way to remove them, and which of the two outcomes an author meets is a property of the deployment rather than of the intent. The proposal adds no key. The construct already states that the generated child set is owned by the expansion; this completes that ownership across the master's last event.
This was referenced Aug 19, 2026
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Adds
proposals/0021-expansion-master-delete.md. Does not touchversions/.expansionsbinds the master's create and update and says nothing about its delete, so the rows it generated are the one part of a record that survives it — still pointing at an id that no longer resolves, still counted by every roll-up, report and balance that counted them while the record existed.Referential integrity is not the missing half. Where it is enforced the delete is refused instead, which leaves the author with rows they never entered and no way to remove them; and which of the two outcomes an author meets is a property of the deployment, not of the intent. A composition does not imply it either: composition governs how a child is reached and edited, not what becomes of generated rows when the thing that generated them ceases to exist.
No new key. The construct already states that the generated child set is owned by the expansion; this completes that ownership across the master's last event, so an existing intent gains the behaviour by re-generating. Carries
Specification text+Anchor; theDSL indexsection is omitted deliberately (no construct is added).Deliberately out of scope, and argued in the file: a data-store cascade, which buys the cleanup at the cost of a rule the model neither states nor can see — it fires for rows the expansion does not own, applies to hand-entered children too, and bypasses the child's layer so the events the totals depend on never fire.
Reference implementation: eclipse-dirigible/dirigible#6838 (issue eclipse-dirigible/dirigible#6821). Site page: IntentFile/intentfile.github.io#32.