Consolidate identical records

[dkeller9]

Description

It happens quite often that we discover that two public entitycore ids are in fact the same. We need a function that will replace all references in all projects with the id that is chosen as the true reference, and delete the redundant one. This would be run by an admin user.

Acceptance criteria

• function callable in entitycore that takes two ids and consolidates them

Type

Feature

Projects

'OBI 2025-'
Priority: P2
Time estimate: 1

[GianlucaFicarelli]

This will need more discussion on the use cases and to determine if this should be possible for all the entities, or what type of entities.
I suppose that activities shouldn't be considered for de-duplication, although it should be considered what to do when the linked entities are de-duplicated.

For example:

• we have 2 MEModels that are considered to be the same (can we assume that the user did all the checks to verify that the metadata and the assets are the same?)
• each of these 2 MEModels has different ValidationResults and MEModelCalibrationResult (that are separate entities, not deleted automatically)
• each of these 2 MEModels has been used in separate simulations (that are separate entities)
• if we replace all references in all projects, then we can end up with a single memodel linked to all the ValidationResults of the 1st and 2nd model, that isn't probably correct.

This is an example but there can be more.

Other questions:

• would it be acceptable to delete one public entity that belongs to a project id, and keep another public entity that belongs to a different project id and maybe a different virtual lab? (for reference, a service maintainer is allowed to update or delete public entities only within authorized projects, so it may affect this possibility)

[dkeller9]

The user should check to be sure that the entities are the same. Probably we should restrict the scope of consolidation so that models are out of scope. This is because the dependencies are more complicated for models. For the last question, I think it is okay if the consolidated entities are in different projects. It is unfortunate that our data model still associates public entities with particular projects, but of course there are valid reasons. Still, we may wish to consider alternatives at some point.