Bug: contact topic answers are permanently deleted when a case contact is soft-deleted

[cliftonmcintosh]

Impacted User Types

All users who can delete and restore case contacts — admins and supervisors.

Environment

Any environment. This is a data loss issue in the Rails model layer, not specific to a browser or deployment.

Current Behavior

When a case contact is deleted, the contact_topic_answers associated with it are permanently removed from the database. If the case contact is later restored, it will be missing all of its topic answers.

This happens because CaseContact uses acts_as_paranoid for soft deletes, but ContactTopicAnswer does not. The dependent: :destroy cascade from a paranoia soft-delete issues a real SQL DELETE on contact_topic_answers, not a soft delete.

The restore(recursive: true) call in CaseContactsController#restore only recovers records that were themselves soft-deleted — so permanently deleted contact_topic_answers cannot be recovered.

Relevant code in app/models/case_contact.rb:

acts_as_paranoid
has_many :contact_topic_answers, dependent: :destroy

Expected Behavior

Deleting a case contact should soft-delete its contact_topic_answers as well, so that restoring the case contact also restores the topic answers.

How to Replicate

1. Log in as an admin
2. Navigate to a casa case (e.g. /casa_cases/:id)
3. Create a case contact and fill in at least one contact topic answer
4. Delete the case contact
5. Return to the casa case page — the deleted contact appears with [DELETE] prefixed to its name
6. Observe that the contact topic answers are no longer shown for the deleted contact
7. Click the "undelete" button to restore the case contact
8. Observe that the topic answers are still not shown on the restored contact

Screen recording of bug

Screen.Recording.2026-04-09.at.16.03.50.mov

How to access the QA site

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• all_casa_admin1@example.com — view site as an all casa admin
  • go to /all_casa_admins/sign_in

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