Prevent Published Pages/Assets from being deleted from author

​@stevegorman77 , Good suggestion. 

AEM already has part of this built in. When you delete an item that's referenced or activated, you get the "Force Delete" warning first (the "one or more item(s) has local references and/or activated" dialog), so there's a heads-up before deletion.

More importantly: confirming delete on a published item is meant to deactivate it (pull it off publish) and then delete on author. I just tested this on our AEMaaCS and the asset was correctly removed from both — no orphan left behind. So if you have to restore from trash and clean up publish separately, that auto-deactivate isn't firing in your setup, and that's something worth checking - may be a blocked replication queue.

Are you on AEMaaCS or on-prem/AMS? The delete-and-deactivate path differs between them.

And you actually want is a hard stop?  block deleting published items entirely rather than just warn?  

that would be a small customization and happy to share an approach.

Hello and thanks for the reply.   We are running AEMaaCS.  And i just rechecked and yes we also get the “Force Delete” popup exactly as the image you shared.    I also am able to validate that the deletion of the ASSET from author did also remove it from publisher.   I tested this in our dev instance and will also test it more thoroughly  in production to ensure our prod env doesnt have any issues. 

I dont believe we would want is a hard stop?  but i think if the Force Delete dialog box would be more specific.  Right now it says “and/or” which doesnt really let the user know if the content is really published or not.    But im wondering if a AUthor does a build delete from the dam by selecting multiple items and then deleting them in one shot, maybe this dialog box would not be able to show all the details of which pages were published. 
Maybe the dialog box you shared above should also say “if your content was published, this force delete will  also un-publish and flush the items”.  

Thanks,  I agree a hard stop would be too much given AEM already unpublishes and flushes safely on delete. The issue is just that the dialog does not tell you clearly what is happening.

2 things would help. First, the "and/or activated" wording is vague, so rewording it to plainly say that published items will also be unpublished and flushed is a quick dialog-text change. Second, and this is your real point, on a bulk DAM delete the out-of-the-box dialog cannot show which of the selected items were actually published. A custom confirmation dialog could check the replication status of each selected item and summarise it, for example "3 of 12 selected items are published and will be removed from the live site," so the author makes an informed decision instead of guessing.

Both are doable on AEMaaCS by overlaying the delete action's dialog. I would actually be happy to put together a working version of this and share it back with the community rather than just leaving it as a suggestion. Let me know if that would be useful.