Has anyone else noticed that PAC records (the system lists we use in patient lists) can only be hard-deleted and not soft-deleted? That makes migration tricky, because you cannot migrate hard-deleted records! That forces us to need to manually hard-delete the records in every environment – which isn’t the end of the world, but gives us more limited options.

One approach I’ve done at past implementations (and just setup in our environments), is to have a specific parent system list folder that houses “deleted” system lists. If you need to “delete” a system list in POC, all you have to do is drag and drop the system list into this “deleted” folder. Then simply migrate the PAC (the actual system list that you dragged and dropped). If you need to delete a bunch of system lists, you could also change the folder using an import (PAC,1000 as the import spec). Just set item 34000 = Deleted System Lists [5276] and item 34150 = DELETED SYSTEM LISTS [5274].

This doesn’t prevent you from hard-deleting the system list and manually deleting it in each environment (especially for pure errors), but this can be a helpful alternative, especially if there is the possibility that we might want to re-activate the list in the future, because you can just drag it back and migrate it. The cool part about this is that the parent deletion folder is currently set to “released” in POC, but “not released” in PRD. So we can see the folder in POC but end users can’t see it in PRD!

*Here is POC. This is set to NO in PRD and we have a content management ticket blocking it’s migration.