Delete confirmation should have "replace relationships" shortcut

[Adrian Holovaty]

This is best explained with an example.

Right now, when I click to delete a duplicate dateline, I get a list of all the news stories that feature that dateline. So I click on each story to change its dateline to the correct (non-duplicate) dateline, because if I didn't do that, deleting the dateline would delete all those stories. Then, once I've changed all the stories, I can delete the dateline safely, because it won't have any relationships.

What I want is the delete-confirmation page for datelines -- and everything else -- to offer a "convert all of these stories' datelines to the following *different* dateline" select box.

[Jeff Forcier <jeff@…>]

This may want to be associated with #1007, as they both deal with the same root issue - behavioral changes when deleting objects with associated "sub-objects".

The primary sticking point here, IMHO, is how to identify what constitutes a duplicate; that will vary greatly depending on database schema.

Offhand I'm thinking it could be a model option where the user can specify a field(s) whose value is necessarily not unique, but which defines this duplicity; the updated code would search for another single object with identical values in those fields and use that as the target for the sub-object move. Obviously that raises the question of "hey, so uh, why didn't you make that field unique?" but at least Adrian and myself have run into such a situation, so it can't be that silly an idea.

[James Bennett]

Closing in favor of #1007 since that one has more discussion and a couple of patches.