Delete a Person

While it might seem like a natural thing to do, deleting a person is not allowed in Rock. Why? The history of a person must be maintained for historical records to be accurate. Think about giving and check-in. If a person was deleted, you would lose their contributions and attendance information. Instead of deleting people, you can inactivate them in the database (more on how to do this later).

Let's look at some common situations where you might want to delete a record, and how to handle them in Rock.

Scenario: John Doe no longer attends and has asked to be removed from the database.

In Rock: You can consider John removed when he has been marked inactive. This should remove him from all future emails.

Scenario: You added a duplicate record and want to delete the new one.

In Rock: Instead of deleting the record you'll need to merge it with the existing record. See the Duplicates section below on how to do this.

Scenario: You added a test record and now want to delete it.

In Rock: It would be best not to add test records to your production environment. You might consider creating a test environment that you can treat as a sandbox. If you added a sample record to your database, you have two options. The first option is to inactivate it like it was a normal person. The second would be to merge the record with an existing record.