0012160: Deleting a project deletes all categories for issues that have been moved out of the project - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update
0012160	mantisbt	administration	public	2010-07-13 01:37	2011-08-05 02:20

Reporter	anthropic	Assigned To	jreese
Priority	high	Severity	major	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	won't fix
Product Version	1.2.1

Summary	0012160: Deleting a project deletes all categories for issues that have been moved out of the project
Description	After moving 1000+ issues out of a project and then deleting the project, all the moved issues ended up without categories. They then silently take on the first category in the list when they are next edited as highlighted by issue 0010593. Categories should not be deleted when the project they were created for is.
Additional Information	As I commented in issue 0010593 I suggest 3 changes: A link table between category and project so if the project is deleted the category can remain, also so there is less duplication and more consistency in the database for category names (I had a colleague add the same category in four projects with three different spellings which annoyed me greatly!). A way to re-link a category to another project, perhaps a category admin page. and A way to search for orphaned issues that have category or other fields that are no longer valid.
Tags	No tags attached.

yw84ever 2010-07-13 04:58 reporter ~0026069	Categories for a project are details for that project. Where should they go then once that project is deleted? Would you like them to automatically become global categories? And yes, it probably makes sense to update each ticket with an existing category. Instead of moving the issues first, perhaps the system could help one through handling existing tickets/catories. "This project contained the categories x,y, and z and 456 issues. Deleting this project deletes these categories and issues as well. Move issues? Move Categories? Update categories in moved issues?" and so on.

anthropic 2010-07-13 20:46 reporter ~0026074 Last edited: 2010-07-13 20:48	Well I would suggest that there should be orphaned categories and that when editing categories for a project you can add orphaned categories. I understand that a category is a detail, but more often than not categories are going to be similar between projects. I think orphaned categories is better than adding them to global, although it may be worth adding them to the project they have been moved into, but some may not want that to happen. With orphaned categories there's less chance of Categories ever being deleted accidentally for an issue. At the same time being able to see all issues assigned to an orphaned category so the category can then be added to projects they are found in or the issues can be updated easily would be helpful. At the least it would be nice to stop users from deleting a project while category dependencies exist.

jreese 2010-08-22 17:58 reporter ~0026404	I'm going to first say that I agree that the current handling is poor, but I will also say that your suggestion is not feasible, and will really only serve to cause further confusion than the existing implementation, and is just begging for categories to stay "orphaned" forever when their parent projects are deleted. The correct solution is to require the user to re-categorize issues at the same time that they move issues between projects, not to wallpaper over the current mistakes by adding further complexity and indirection. I'm folding this into issue 0010593 because of the direction this needs to take. We just need someone to be able to take the time to implement the new UI for prompting the re-categorization when moving issues. How that will be handled for the case of mass edits, I don't know; that will need to be figured out at the same time, and is why I haven't yet taken the time to do this previously. The real solution is to just be in the habit of re-categorizing issues as soon as you move them to the new project. If you don't like duplicating categories between projects, global or inherited categories were explicitly added to reduce the level of duplication required.