Ok have hit the wall with this. Does Laravel / Eloquent actually create foreign keys normally or just fake it and pretend they were there and follow through with cascading delete etc ?

Because I keep checking the table structure with navicat and its created an additional index with a name convention of "[table]_[othertable]_foreign" on the field I specified. No foreign keys or triggers to be found.

is it faking it, and is the only reason stuff got removed is eloquent cleaning up, or
is there something wrong with $table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');

the only other thing i can think of which i'll try tomorrow is the local table in this case is menu_item_user, named for the pivot between menu_item and user. And I'm hoping that menu_item isnt qhats screwing everything up, the menu_items table was created when i got artisan to auto gen the migration from the MenuItem model I made.

Many to Many Relationships With Linking Tables

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