How can we treat different meanings of delete in our domain model

Question

I have two questions related to Udi Dahan's article : Don’t Delete – Just Don’t

• Sometimes we do need delete, the user (domain expert) request the delete functionality(the real meaning) for wrong data, Say the HR user has a form to add employees and he inserted wrong employee data, He wants to delete this data, It's not used in business yet and it's totally different from Retire or Fire an employee. How to handle the two cases in implementation?
• How to make the UI more representative for this case ? using two buttons One shown only if we can DELETE employee and the other if we want to RETIRE employee ?

Answer 1

If the business wants this functionality and if they speak this words then it means they are part of the Ubiquitous language. In this case you may add the delete command. It is however recommended to make the intention clearer; you can name the command as deleteUserBecauseOfInvalidRegistration or so. In this case the delete command is part of the domain model; this means that you can easily restrict the deletion of the user depending on the other properties; for example, a user cannot be deleted anymore if it has approved by the HR manager or so. Then the UI can easily reflect this behavior by hiding the delete button if the operation is not permitted.

An alternative, when the business specialists have heard the word "delete" used by the IT guys so its not from the real domain, you may expose this functionality only in the Admin UI, as a low level command that deletes the rows from the database. The Admin UI could then be accessed only by some higher level persons, like the HR manager.