Redmine

When you delete a project, all the related data is deleted.

mysql> select * from issues where project_id = 3;
+----+------------+------------+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------+----------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------------+---------------------+---------------------+------------+------------+-----------------+-----------+---------+------+------+------------+-----------+
| id | tracker_id | project_id | subject                         | description                                     | due_date | category_id | status_id | assigned_to_id | priority_id | fixed_version_id | author_id | lock_version | created_on          | updated_on          | start_date | done_ratio | estimated_hours | parent_id | root_id | lft  | rgt  | is_private | closed_on |
+----+------------+------------+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------+----------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------------+---------------------+---------------------+------------+------------+-----------------+-----------+---------+------+------+------------+-----------+
|  5 |          1 |          3 | Subproject issue                | This is an issue on a cookbook subproject       | NULL     |        NULL |         1 |           NULL |           4 |             NULL |         2 |            0 | 2018-12-19 18:54:11 | 2018-12-22 18:54:11 | NULL       |          0 |            NULL |      NULL |       5 |    1 |    2 |          0 | NULL      |
| 13 |          1 |          3 | Subproject issue two            | This is a second issue on a cookbook subproject | NULL     |        NULL |         1 |           NULL |           4 |             NULL |         2 |            0 | 2018-12-19 18:54:11 | 2018-12-22 18:54:11 | NULL       |          0 |            NULL |      NULL |      13 |    1 |    2 |          0 | NULL      |
| 14 |          1 |          3 | Private issue on public project | This is a private issue                         | NULL     |        NULL |         1 |           NULL |           5 |             NULL |         2 |            0 | 2018-12-09 18:54:11 | 2018-12-09 18:54:11 | NULL       |          0 |            NULL |      NULL |      14 |    1 |    2 |          1 | NULL      |
| 15 |          3 |          3 | Private issue on public project | This is a private issue                         | NULL     |        NULL |         2 |           NULL |           5 |             NULL |         1 |            0 | 2019-01-10 03:20:53 | 2019-01-10 03:20:53 | 2019-01-10 |          0 |            NULL |      NULL |      15 |    1 |    2 |          1 | NULL      |
+----+------------+------------+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+----------+-------------+-----------+----------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------------+---------------------+---------------------+------------+------------+-----------------+-----------+---------+------+------+------------+-----------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Deleted the project with id 3 from UI, Administration -> Projects

mysql> select * from issues where project_id = 3;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mr gosh wrote:

There should be a bossibility to move all tickets with the affected tracker to another tracker or a NULL?
At least during deletion of the tracker itself.

You already have this possibility, you can open the Issue global page, filter issues only by the tracker that you want to delete and using bulk edit, change tracker type to another.

mr gosh wrote:

You're right - but this is not possible if you have closed or archived projects - but this can be achieved by re-opening these projects - perhaps we reconsider our "projects don't get deleted" philosophy at this point. ;)

It is possible when you have closed projects because you can filter issues by "Project's status" (feature available in Redmine 4.0.0, please see #20081), but indeed, for archived projects, you can't and on instances with a lot of archived projects, it could be quite a challenge.

I'm reopening this ticket as s Feature, maybe we can find a solution to help users delete trackers used by issues from archived projects. As a first idea, what do you think if we add to the error message the archived projects that have issues with that tracker?

Marius BĂLTEANU wrote in #note-4:

I'm reopening this ticket as s Feature, maybe we can find a solution to help users delete trackers used by issues from archived projects. As a first idea, what do you think if we add to the error message the archived projects that have issues with that tracker?

The attached patch 12521.patch implements similar feature. When tracker cannot be deleted, it displays links to all projects including archived ones which have issues with the tracker.

Althgouh an error page is displayed if you click a link to an archived project, you can unarchive the project by clicking a button in the error page.

Marius BĂLTEANU wrote in #note-7:

I think the patch has an error projects = Project.joins(:issues).where(issues: { tracker_id: 1 }).distinct because tracker_id is hardcoded to 1.

Sorry, I made a trivial mistake. Here is an updated patch with a test.

Setting the target version to 6.0.0.

Holger Just wrote in #note-11:

I'd just propose to update the generated project links to set the status_id filter to "all" so that even closed issues are displayed there. This could look like:

[...]

Thank you for checking the patch, I have changed the code accordingly.

I have committed the patch in r23181.

The tracker deletion error message now displays a list of projects that contain issues under the tracker. See the screenshots in #note-6.