Questions related to soft delete in laravel

Question

I have some questions relating to soft delete in laravel. I have search up on what it does and what it means and the most understandable part about soft delete is from this sentence

"When models are soft deleted, they are not actually removed from your database. Instead, a deleted_at attribute is set on the model and inserted into the database. If a model has a non-null deleted_at value, the model has been soft deleted. To enable soft deletes for a model, use the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes trait on the model and add the deleted_at column to your $dates property:"

So here are my questions based from that sentence:

Q1:

So when I use soft delete in my code, and when I try to delete some data, does the data in the view page(blade.php) disappear while the database still contain those data?

Q2:

I saw some people using something called static::deleting, I don't really quite get how this work? Could you explain what it does? Thank you

Q3:

How do you delete data using soft delete? I saw people just putting some stuff into their model instead of using button, so does that mean you can only delete it manually inside the model instead of just clicking the delete button in the view page?

Answer 1

Question 1

By default: Yes.
It depends on your query. When using soft deletes, Laravel will query all models that are not soft-deleted by default. When you also want to get the soft-deleted models, you need to call the withTrashed() method on your query. Read more here:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent#querying-soft-deleted-models

To understand what withTrashed() does, you need to understand how soft-deleting works. Soft-deleting models works by adding a new column to your database tables called deleted_at. It's value defaults to null. When you soft-delete a model, Laravel will put the current timestamp into that column. Therefore, this field doesn't contain a null value anymore.

When querying models when using soft-deletes, Laravel appends a deleted_at is null condition to the query. Calling the withTrashed() method, removes that condition from the query.

Have a look on the source of the default query modifier and the withTrashed method.

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Question 2

That are events. You can call that to tell Laravel, that it should execute that specific closure when this event happens. In your example, it is listening for the "deleting" event. See more on that here:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent#events

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Question 3

You can entirely delete soft-deletable models with the forceDelete() method. See "Permanently Deleting Models" here:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent#querying-soft-deleted-models

Answer 2

Q1: So when I use soft delete in my code, and when I try to delete some data, does the data in the view page(blade.php) disappear while the database still contain those data?

Yes. The soft delete fill the deleted_at column in the database. Since that, Eloquent will not retrieve these data (except if you ask for). If you use custom SQL request, you'll need to add a WHERE deleted_at IS NULL

Q2: I saw some people using something called static::deleting, I don't really quite get how this work? Could you explain what it does? Thank you

I'm not using that day to day, but it's an event you can call (see here ) to automatically delete content related (for example, if you remove an user, you can also remove all his post. It's kind of cascading delete)

Q3: How do you delete data using soft delete? I saw people just putting some stuff into their model instead of using button, so does that mean you can only delete it manually inside the model instead of just clicking the delete button in the view page?

To use the soft delete, you just $object->detroy($id) or $myEloquentRequest->where(...)->delete() If you want to force a real delete (so the entries will be definitly removed from the database), you can use $flight->forceDelete(); See here for more. You can do the delete wherever you want. The click on a button bring the user to the delete() method in your controller. You can delete there or call a method inside the model to trigger the delete (and maybe some more complex deleting like event ... )