is there any way to retract without the value? I saw a discussion about this in the group from ’14 or so, but was wondering if anything’s been added since.

Only one "intrinsic" way: assert new fact on cardinality-one e+a

One indirect way: :db.fn/retractEntity tx fn will retract a whole tree of things on an entity without knowing their value

Otherwise you need to write a transaction function which reads the current value first so it can retract it

Keep in mind that retraction without a value is essentially saying "last writer wins". Be sure that's the semantics you want

ok, thx, yeah in this case, it’s just a single attribute, will look at using a tx fn.

yeah that’s a good point as well

Datomic has set semantics on card-many, often you can reconcile different writes safely

(Not always though)

yeah and in this case it’s actually a card-one

going to rethink it a bit