My app is an employee app for companies to manage their teams. One feature in the app is that employees can create content that gets posted in an inline list. I was very pleased with enabling the deletion of employees from the app directly by the company’s app admin, until I realized that when they are deleted (their entire row from the user profile), their name is also deleted from any posts that they made while they were active in the app. The posts are stamped with date of post and the person who created. Looks very odd to have the name disappear (and I definitely don’t want their content to disappear when they leave the company). Any ideas on how to solve this? One idea I have is that instead of deleting the user, we would assign them a status of alumni and put up a tab that blocks them from seeing anything but this seems like a bad workaround. Thoughts?!
why dont you give admins an ability to check a box called is alumni then create an if then else aying if the checkbox is true alumni if not then the users normal name
if that does not work great allow admins to edit and make them change thier names to alumni (for example if an employees name is deena make it that when editing they should edit the name to Alumni-deena)
Thank you for this suggestion! I actually DO want the user deleted from the sheet but I don’t want the user’s name to be deleted from their post on the inline list. So, I think this suggestion still allows the user to exist in the app and their profile visible but marked as Alum? Companies don’t want their ex-employees still listed in the directory…other thoughts? Or did I misunderstand your suggestion?
The basic rules
1.Anything that can be added, can be deleted.
2. Anything that can be deleted, can be revived (hence: archive). Your looking for the term Archive.
You want solution two. You want to archive all former employees. This is what you need to do:
- Create a live duplicate of the sheet in question (“DP”).
- Under the main inline list, add a further inline list (call this archives)
- Use DP as your archive,
If you need inspiration check out my apps, especially my restaurant delivery apps which are all about new orders, pending orders, dispatched orders, and archived orders. But you cannot use the main sheet to serve as both live and dead inline lists. Hence two inline lists. You will just add a button column on the duplicate inline list to filter by dead/archived/ex employees; and the main sheet by current employees.
This way nothing need get deleted from the sheet.
I am very busy at the moment so might not be available for reply, but just check out my delivery apps.
Thank you
Thank you, that’s amazing advice and makes total sense. Appreciate that you took the time to answer while you’re busy! I will check out your apps. 
I take it you’re using relation - lookup to get back the name?
You can just add the user name via Column components via the form when the user post an item. That way it won’t ever get deleted when the user is removed.