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In scenarios when you delete a parent record - say for example a blog post - you may want to also delete any comments associated with it as a form of self-maintenance of your data.

Normally, you would use your database's foreign key constraints, adding anON DELETE CASCADE rule to the foreign key constraint in your comments table.

It may be useful to be able to restore a parent record after it was deleted. In those instances, you may reach for Laravel'ssoft deleting functionality.

In doing so, however, you lose the ability to use the cascading delete functionality that your database would otherwise provide. That is where this package aims to bridge the gap in functionality when using theSoftDeletes trait.

<?phpnamespaceApp;useApp\Comment;useDyrynda\Database\Support\CascadeSoftDeletes;useIlluminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;useIlluminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;class Postextends Model{use SoftDeletes, CascadeSoftDeletes;protected$cascadeDeletes = ['comments'];protected$dates = ['deleted_at'];protected$fetchMethod ='get';// get, cursor, lazy or chunk// protected $chunkSize = 500;publicfunctioncomments()    {return$this->hasMany(Comment::class);    }}

Now you can delete anApp\Post record, and any associatedApp\Comment records will be deleted. If theApp\Comment record implements theCascadeSoftDeletes trait as well, it's children will also be deleted and so on.

$post =App\Post::find($postId)$post->delete();// Soft delete the post, which will also trigger the delete() method on any comments and their children.

Note: It's important to know that when you cascade your soft deleted child records, there is no way to know which were deleted by the cascading operation, and which were deleted prior to that. This means that when you restore the blog post, the associated comments will not be.

Because this trait hooks into thedeleting Eloquent model event, we can prevent the parent record from being deleted as well as any child records, if any exception is triggered. ALogicException will be triggered if the model does not use theIlluminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes trait, or if any of the definedcascadeDeletes relationships do not exist, or do not return an instance ofIlluminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Relation.

This trait is installed viaComposer. To install, simply add to yourcomposer.json file:

$ composer require dyrynda/laravel-cascade-soft-deletes

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If you believe you have found an issue, please report it using theGitHub issue tracker, or better yet, fork the repository and submit a pull request.

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