So I came across a forum post about bubble not deleting the data in fields that have been hard deleted in the app editor, the suggested solution there was to reach out to bubble support to get the data deleted so I reached out to them.
The response was quite frustrating.
First the support asked which fields I was talking about - to which I said “all the deleted fields on all the tables and gave several examples”
Then they replied with “we need a list of the fields for each table that you want to delete”
Now, I’ve been bubbling for many years and I’m constantly moving fields, adding and removing fields to data tables as the database evolves and changes. I have some bubble apps with hundreds of data tables and likely thousand+ fields (and likely hundreds of deleted fields). The bubble support basically indicated that if I wanted to actually remove the data from these fields that I would have to give them a list of the fields to clear.
The issue here is that the only way to do that is to load each data on a page and compare the returned data to the fields in the table in the app editor and then figure out which fields are no longer existing in the editor. An extremely tedious and time consuming task.
Apparently there is no way for bubble support to do this and I have to do it manually on my end.
So, my frustration is really:
- we are being charged per character returned and all fields (including deleted fields) are being returned whenever the data is used on the page - so we are all being overcharged for data we ‘think’ no longer exists
- fields and their data are not actually deleted when we delete them in the app editor and their data is still exposed and returned to the browser (major issue if you had secure data in the wrong place)
- you cannot change privacy rules on fields that were hard deleted - so there’s no way to solve for #2 except to set the rule first before deleting
- there is no way to actually resolve the issue in any reasonable way with bubble support.
Does anyone have a solution for removing the data in deleted fields - or even a time-efficient solution to identify the deleted fields per table so I can send it to bubble support.