CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

That sounds like either a bug or a documentation issue in advanced search. It might be doing the query on the underlying CONTACT, which is probably not deleted, and then when you choose display as case it still only cares about the CONTACT status.

I'm not sure what criteria you need that's in advanced search, but you might be able to get the results from either Find Cases or one of the CiviReports, which does handle deleted cases as expected.

Thanks for the responses.

I did see the first post, but not the second, that you supplied above.

So... what do we need to do here, and how can I help? I can help if it's a documentation issue (probably), but (probably not) if it's a bug.  What further querying can I do through the UI to help determine the nature of what's happening?

(And I do want to help; I have gotten so much help out of the forums through our deployment process-- I want to give back where I can.)

Maybe if you can confirm that the same thing happens on the public demo, to rule out some other problem:
http://demo.civicrm.org/

And then since there are multiple issues in this thread I'd just like to clarify what we're talking about:

1)
(a) On advanced search, when you choose display as cases, is the query ignoring the deleted status of a case if the client contact otherwise satisfies the search criteria?
(b) If so, is this the desired/expected behaviour because advanced search is really a CONTACT search, so deleted is intended to apply to the contact. I can see arguments both ways.
  (i) If yes, then documentation should be updated to clarify that and the results screen should identify deleted cases as deleted.
  (ii) If no, then the search code should be updated to exclude deleted cases.

2) Should there be a way through the UI to empty the case trash and remove the entries completely from the database. Personally I think yes, but if so then it should be something that can be disabled outside the UI, because for certain legal-type applications you want to enforce the audit trail and not allow even admin users to turn that off.

3) (The second link in Pete's post above) When you delete a contact, their cases do not automatically get put in trash, and so some queries, like case dashboard, still end up including the cases. This is complicated by the fact that you can have multiple clients on a case, but in a single-client case it seems like those cases should automatically get put in trash.