Events API Request: Report Deletion Events
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2025 3:55 pm
Use Case
In our software we help users with claim submission tasks. Our software tracks claims that are ready to be submitted and that have been submitted so the users can observe responses.
We also have a lot of data related to the claims in our system to allow the users to interact with things like patients and plans, etc.
One issue we have is the need to know when objects from Open Dental have been deleted so that we can remove them from our system. However, since Open Dental doesn't have soft delete functionality for many of its tables it is very challenging for us to find records that have been deleted without putting a large load on the MySQL database.
To give an example of the trouble we run into right now that we're trying to avoid, currently if we have 100 claims in our system that users are interacting with and we want to know minute by minute if one of those claims has been deleted, we have to query the claim table for all 100 claims and, if we get fewer than 100 results, we can check which one(s) are missing and have therefore been deleted. For a table with many records like claims this query can be slow, and can be hard on the database and the resources of the Open Dental machine. It also needs to be done for several other tables which becomes a compounding issue.
Request
We were thinking it would be a great use of the Events API, if we could subscribe to events that would tell us when certain tables had records deleted. Is it possible for you to implement something like that for your API users? Here are the tables we would initially like to see deleted events for:
Thank you for looking into this, we look forward to hearing back from you!
In our software we help users with claim submission tasks. Our software tracks claims that are ready to be submitted and that have been submitted so the users can observe responses.
We also have a lot of data related to the claims in our system to allow the users to interact with things like patients and plans, etc.
One issue we have is the need to know when objects from Open Dental have been deleted so that we can remove them from our system. However, since Open Dental doesn't have soft delete functionality for many of its tables it is very challenging for us to find records that have been deleted without putting a large load on the MySQL database.
To give an example of the trouble we run into right now that we're trying to avoid, currently if we have 100 claims in our system that users are interacting with and we want to know minute by minute if one of those claims has been deleted, we have to query the claim table for all 100 claims and, if we get fewer than 100 results, we can check which one(s) are missing and have therefore been deleted. For a table with many records like claims this query can be slow, and can be hard on the database and the resources of the Open Dental machine. It also needs to be done for several other tables which becomes a compounding issue.
Request
We were thinking it would be a great use of the Events API, if we could subscribe to events that would tell us when certain tables had records deleted. Is it possible for you to implement something like that for your API users? Here are the tables we would initially like to see deleted events for:
- adjustment
- appointment
- carrier
- claim
- claimpayment
- claimproc
- claimtracking
- clinic*
- commlog
- definition*
- fee
- feesched
- insplan
- inssub
- insverify
- patient
- patientnote
- patplan
- payment
- payplancharge
- payplanlink
- paysplit
- perioexam
- periomeasure
- preference*
- procedurecode
- procedurelog
- procnote
- provider*
- providercliniclink*
- site*
- tootinitial
Thank you for looking into this, we look forward to hearing back from you!