Set records aside and restore them
Purpose
An obsolete contact or closed organization may still explain earlier association work. This capability sets the record aside without destroying that context and lets an authorized administrator restore it later. It separates ordinary availability from business status, so archiving a body does not rewrite what its status or relationships mean.
How It Works
Archive and unarchive are separate authorized actions, each using the version read and respecting update locks. Archive records the actor, time, and optional reason, advances the version, and creates a revision while leaving status and collections intact. Asking for the state already present has no effect. Restoration clears archive information and can retain its own reason until a later archive.
Archived records disappear from default lists and ordinary selection, but an explicit archived selection and a direct identity read remain available. Ordinary edits, imports, and disconnected-detail actions are refused while system bookkeeping, merge work, and deletion have their stated exceptions. An archived organization retains every affiliation; relationship reads identify its archive state rather than erasing its name or history. Ordinary saves cannot set archive metadata themselves.
Example
Harbor Engineering closes while three former employees still have ended affiliations to it. An administrator archives the organization with a reason. Staff no longer find it in ordinary selection, but an existing link opens the retained record and its Past people view. If the firm reopens, the administrator reads the current version and restores it, preserving the old connections rather than rebuilding them.
The administrator first reads Harbor Engineering's current version and records Closed after final contract as the archive reason. If she has update permission alone, the lifecycle action is refused; ordinary editing authority does not imply archive authority. A full update lock also prevents archive until properly released. After success, a direct read still returns the firm and its retained affiliation context, while the ordinary list excludes it. An archived-only selection finds it for retention work. If the administrator repeats the archive while it is already archived, the request does not manufacture another state change. Restoration uses the explicit unarchive action rather than editing its status.
Why It Works This Way
Our reading is that archive preserves an explanation of the past while changing the record's availability for present work. Keeping status independent prevents a closed organization's archive operation from inventing a new business status. Dedicated permission and version checks make this a deliberate lifecycle action rather than a side effect of an ordinary correction.
Blocking ordinary edits stabilizes a record set aside for retention, while explicit reads preserve its usefulness as a historical reference. Retaining affiliations avoids rewriting former employees' records to disguise the organization's closure. No-op behavior prevents retries from manufacturing revisions. Dedicated archive actions prevent integrations from bypassing those safeguards by writing the archive fields in an otherwise ordinary payload.
Relationships
Contact and Organization retain their identities and owned information through this operation. Locate people and organizations applies archive to ordinary discovery, including Platform pickers and Quick Search. Affiliations and Roles exposes retained connections. Record locks constrain lifecycle actions, and Inspect a record’s changes over time explains them. Remove records and their owned information remains a separate destructive capability.