Resource Lifecycle Patterns
Table of contents
Patterns governing how resources are reserved, allocated, held, committed, and released.
The same pattern appears across domains: a seat hold at an airline, an inventory reservation at a retailer, a credit limit check at a bank, a bed assignment at a hospital. Different vocabulary, different stakes, one pattern.
Patterns in this category
- Provisional Commitment — a resource is held for a requester for a bounded window, then resolves into Confirmed, Released, or Expired. The lifecycle pattern behind credit-limit holds, bed assignments, inventory reservations, room bookings, and seat holds.
grounded. - Soft Delete — record marked deleted and hidden from normal queries, retained in recoverable form until explicit purge. Three states: Active, Deleted, Purged. Deleted is reversible; Purged is terminal. Anchors GDPR Article 17, HIPAA §164.310(d)(2)(i), FRCP Rule 37(e), SOX §802, and ISO 15489-1.
grounded. - Capacity Constraint Enforcement — bounded pool of a finite resource with arithmetic that enforces total allocated never exceeds declared capacity. Three states: Open, Suspended, Closed. Units are fungible (no per-allocation identity at this layer); composes with Provisional Commitment for the per-allocation lifecycle. Unblocks Reservation Lifecycle (C9).
partially resolved— author-led foundation round complete (Pass 1 GRID, Pass 2 EOS, Pass 3 Linus); AI adversarial round and Phase 4 Opus clearance gate pending. - Resource allocation with expiry — (forthcoming)
- Idempotent reservation — (realized as the Idempotent Reservation composition)
This category is under active development. Pattern proposals welcome.