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Understanding how active and inactive objects behave

Describes the options and limitations of active and inactive objects.

Deactivating an object was introduced in Web Services 2.5. Deactivating an object allows historical data to remain in the database but gives you the option to remove the object(s) from lists and discourage people from using them.

Internal structure

To activate/deactivate an object you must toggle a boolean metadata field. The following table provides an overview of the objects and the field.
ObjectField
BaselineFISHBASELINEACTIVE
Output FormatFISHOBJECTACTIVE
UserFISHOBJECTACTIVE
User GroupFISHOBJECTACTIVE
User RoleFISHOBJECTACTIVE
For instance, to deactivate a user, you must add (during update) the following statement to the Metadata XML:
<ishfield name='FISHOBJECTACTIVE' level='none' ishvaluetype='element'>FALSE</ishfield>

Consequences for the API functions

Know that the inactive objects are still valid values and can be used as metadata in any API call.

Since an inactive object is still a valid value, each retrieve call returns all objects, including the inactive ones unless extra filtering is used. Therefore, all new Web Services 2.5 retrieve calls have an Activity Filter parameter which allows reducing the result to the active objects.