Can I retrieve all revisions of a deleted document? - couchdb

Question

I know I can retrieve all revisions of an "available" document, but can I retrieve the last "available" version of a deleted document? I do not know the revision id prior to the delete. This is the command I am currently running...it returns {"error":"not_found","reason":"deleted"}.
curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/test_database/a213ccad?revs_info=true

Answer 1

I've got this problem, trying to recover deleted document, here is my solution:
0) until you run a compaction, get deleted history, e.g.:
curl http://example.iriscouch.com/test/_changes
1) you'll see deleted documents with $id and $rev, put empty document as new version, e.g.:
curl -X PUT http://example.iriscouch.com/test/$id?rev=$rev -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d {}
2) now you can get all revisions info, e.g:
curl http://example.iriscouch.com/test/$id?revs_info=true
See also Retrieve just deleted document

Answer 2

Besides _changes, another good way to do this is to use keys with _all_docs:
GET $MYDB/_all_docs?keys=["foo"] ->
{
"offset": 0,
"rows": [
{
"id": "foo",
"key": "foo",
"value": {
"deleted": true,
"rev": "2-eec205a9d413992850a6e32678485900"
}
}
],
"total_rows": 0
}
Note that it has to be keys; key will not work, because only keys returns info for deleted docs.

Answer 3

You can get the last revision of a deleted document, however first you must first determine its revision id. To do that, you can query the _changes feed and scan for the document's deletion record — this will contain the last revision and you can then fetch it using docid?rev=N-XXXXX.
I remember some mailinglist discussion of making this easier (as doing a full scan of the changes feed is obviously not ideal for routine usage), but I'm not sure anything came of it.

Answer 4

I've hit this several times recently, so for anyone else wandering by ...
This question typically results from a programming model that needs to know which document was deleted. Since user keys such as 'type' don't survive deletion and _id is best assigned by couch, it would often be nice to peak under the covers and see something about the doc that was deleted. An alternative is to have a process that sets deleted:True (no underscore) for documents, and to adjust any listener filters, etc., to look for deleted:True. One of the processes can then actually delete the document. This means that any process triggering on the document doesn't need to track an _id for eventual deletion.