Handling Deleted Persons, Products, Etc

Hello All,

I have been using dataflows to export and managing changes to our companies Pipedrive data. We use this data to run custom reports in Power BI and we also use this data to allow internal staff to interact with certain business critical resources. I have been doing some testing and I noticed that there is no way of knowing if a item is deleted.

Is that true? Is there truly no way to know if a resources is deleted? I use “update_time” to manage changes to resources and update our database, but if an item is deleted and already in our database - we have no way of knowing to delete it. Anyone have any ideas?

Hey, Brian!
We have the same setup and we compare the datasets. If the Person is not in the last update - we consider it deleted.
Also, I’m not sure whether a deleted Person is available via API, but if so - there are 2 data points:

  • delete_time
  • Active flag

Do you get them?

Hey @Andrei_Panciuc,

I handle it slightly differently. Every day, a process runs that updates all contacts, deals, organizations, activities, activity persons, products, etc. that have been modified in the last 24 hours. Comparing the entire datasets everyday might result in too many API calls on my end.

I think that organizations use the active flag to marked deleted, but I have never seen this actively used for persons. Products does not use the active flag at all, it is just simply removed.

I have thought about using the Pipedrive automations to directly handle deleted values through a webhook, but that requires the solution to be more involved.

I see now. As far as I remember - after pulling all the data at once (paginated, of course) we compare the datasets, instead of calling each Organisation/ Person/ Deal.

Automations may be the best solution since “deleted” is a trigger. I can probably just pass a value through a webhook to know what type of item was deleted (org, deal, person). This would allow me to just have one process that handles deletion.

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