Laravel Soft Delete

This Is How To Do a Laravel Soft Delete

We will talk about a little more specific issue today. We do not want our data in our database to be completely deleted. For this reason, we will talk about  Soft Delete on Laravel.

Note: I will tell the story through the blog article system. I continue the narration, thinking that you are creating a Laravel Project. Lecture design, design, and so on. I will not use things. I will only talk about Soft Delete.

Let’s define a few routes first.

# /routes/api.php
        Route::group(['prefix' => 'blog'], static function () {

            Route::get('all', 'BlogController@all');

            Route::get('list', 'BlogController@list');

            Route::get('only-trashed', 'BlogController@onlyTrashed');

            Route::post('store', 'BlogController@store');

            Route::delete('delete/{id}', 'BlogController@delete');

            Route::patch('restore/{id}', 'BlogController@restore');

        });

Primarily we added a prefix named Blog and in it

• lists
• List Deleted Only
• Save
• Clear
• Add back

We have defined our operations. Now let’s create one Model and our associated Controller and Migration files.

php artisan make:model Blog -mc

Then let’s define our methods in Controller. After the edits, the Blog Controller should look like this.

 
Here I made use of FormRequest feature to make control operations comfortable. Those who don't know can check out my previous article here. Then we edit our migration file and then run it.
id();

            $table->string('title', 60);

            $table->text('content');

            $table->integer('views', false)->default(0);

            $table->string('author');

            $table->timestamps();

            /**
             * This part is necessary for us to use the soft-delete feature.
             */

            $table->softDeletes();

        });

    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */

    public function down()

    {

        Schema::dropIfExists('blogs');

    }

}
 
The softDeletes method we added here is required to create a column named deleted_at into the blogs table. In this way, we will be able to use our soft-delete feature. Then we update our Model file as follows.

Here SoftDelete trait will manage the deleted_at column and other features for us. Now let's fill in the methods we created into the Controller. It should look like this.
get();

        return response()->json($blogs, 200);

    }

    /**
     * @return JsonResponse
     * Returns all blog posts except deleted ones.
     */

    public function list()

    {

        return response()->json(Blog::all(), 200);

    }

    /**
     * @param StoreRequest $request
     * Saves a new blog post.
     * @return JsonResponse
     */

    public function store(StoreRequest $request)

    {

        $store = [

            'title' => $request->post('title'),

            'content' => $request->post('content'),

            'author' => $request->post('author') ?? "Anonymous",

        ];

        $result = Blog::create($store);

        return response()->json($result, 200);

    }

    /**
     * Deletes a blog post.
     * @param Int $id
     * @return JsonResponse
     */

    public function delete(int $id)

    {

        $blog = Blog::findOrFail($id);

        $blog->delete();

        return response()->json(['deleted_at' => $blog->deleted_at], 200);

    }

    /**
     * Brings back a deleted blog post.
     * @param Int $id
     * @return JsonResponse
     */

    public function restore(int $id)

    {

        /**
         * Find content only among those deleted.
         */

        $blog = Blog::onlyTrashed()->findOrFail($id);

        $blog->restore();

        return response()->json($blog, 200);

    }

    /**
     * It only fetches deleted blog posts.
     */

    public function onlyTrashed()

    {

        /**
         * Here we call onlyTrashed as an extra.
         */

        $blog = Blog::onlyTrashed()->get();

        return response()->json($blog, 200);

    }

}
 
Thus, we have completed our transactions. There are two methods to be aware of here, one of which is withTrashed (). This method allows us to include deleted ones in the query. Another is the onlyTrashed () method we use to fetch only deleted ones. If you want to remove it from your database, you can use forceDelete but I don't recommend it. Here we come to the end of our article.
Good and Error Free Coding for Everyone 🙂