Laravel Soft Delete Cascade

I would assign a foreign key constraint on your migrations for domains, projects, and tasks. Like this:

$table->foreign('company_id')->references('id')->on('companies')->onDelete('cascade');

You can also use Model events for this. On the Company model's boot method, listen for Eloquent's deleting event and simply use the relationships to delete all domains, projects, and tasks.

Everywhere I have onDelete('cascade')

To soft delete relations, you have to do it using model observers

So if company is soft deleted, the 'deleting' event in the company model is hooked to also soft delete the domain(s) associated with company, and then in the Domain model, hook the deleting event so that projects are soft deleted, and so on down the chain of relations.

This is from L5.2; where CampaignEvent has Shifts and Shifts has Activities

CampaignEvent.php;

    //observe this model being deleted and delete the child shifts
    public static function boot ()
    {
        parent::boot();

        self::deleting(function (CampaignEvent $event) {

            foreach ($event->shifts as $shift)
            {
                $shift->delete();
            }
        });
    }

Shift.php

    //observe this model being deleted and delete the child activities
    public static function boot ()
    {
        parent::boot();

        self::deleting(function (Shift $shift) {

            foreach ($shift->activities as $activity)
            {
                $activity->delete();
            }
        });
    }

Foreign key constraints have portability problems, so I would advise against them. I wouldn't even go with the events and observers route, because that still feels like manual work. Instead, you could look at packages that add cascade deleting to your models via traits. You can use the traits with all models with children.

• https://github.com/michaeldyrynda/laravel-cascade-soft-deletes
• https://packagist.org/packages/shiftonelabs/laravel-cascade-deletes

@aalaap Wow, you found a package to replace 8 lines of code.

With this package you have Eloquent/Query Builder support:

https://github.com/Askedio/laravel5-soft-cascade

Also support restricted relations, rollback if supported all actions when error occurs and support all relation types:

One To One

One To Many

One To Many (Inverse)

Many To Many

Has Many Through

Polymorphic Relations

Many To Many Polymorphic Relations

@Snapey Not just 8 when you have thousands of models!

Using a trait is also cleaner and more expressive when you look at the model. It's also far less prone to bugs. Also... DRY!