Can I retrieve all revisions of a deleted document?

Question

I know I can retrieve all revisions of an "available" document, but can I retrieve the last "available" version of a deleted document? I do not know the revision id prior to the delete. This is the command I am currently running...it returns {"error":"not_found","reason":"deleted"}.

curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/test_database/a213ccad?revs_info=true

Answer 1

I've got this problem, trying to recover deleted document, here is my solution:

0) until you run a compaction, get deleted history, e.g.:

curl http://example.iriscouch.com/test/_changes

1) you'll see deleted documents with $id and $rev, put empty document as new version, e.g.:

curl -X PUT http://example.iriscouch.com/test/$id?rev=$rev -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d {}

2) now you can get all revisions info, e.g:

curl http://example.iriscouch.com/test/$id?revs_info=true

See also Retrieve just deleted document

Answer 2

Besides _changes, another good way to do this is to use keys with _all_docs:

GET $MYDB/_all_docs?keys=["foo"] ->

{
    "offset": 0,
    "rows": [
        {
            "id": "foo",
            "key": "foo",
            "value": {
                "deleted": true,
                "rev": "2-eec205a9d413992850a6e32678485900"
            }
        }
    ],
    "total_rows": 0
}

Note that it has to be keys; key will not work, because only keys returns info for deleted docs.