Laravel 4: Eloquent soft deletes and relationships

Question

I have 2 tables, clients and projects and a project is associated with a client. Both the clients and projects implement soft deletes to maintain the relationships for archival reasons i.e. even if I delete a client the project will still have the client information attached.

My problem is that when I delete the client, the reference becomes inaccessible from the project and throws an exception. What I would like to do is soft delete the client but retain the client data from the project relationship.

My blade code is as follows:

@if ($projects->count())
<table class="table table-striped table-bordered">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <th>Client</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>

    <tbody>
        @foreach ($projects as $project)
            <tr>
                <td>{{{ $project->name }}}</td>
                <td>{{{ $project->client->name }}}</td>
                <td>{{ link_to_route('projects.edit', 'Edit', array($project->id), array('class' => 'btn btn-info')) }}</td>
                <td>
                    {{ Form::open(array('method' => 'DELETE', 'route' => array('projects.destroy', $project->id))) }}
                        {{ Form::submit('Delete', array('class' => 'btn btn-danger')) }}
                    {{ Form::close() }}
                </td>
            </tr>
        @endforeach
    </tbody>
</table> @else There are no projects @endif

Here are the migrations:

        Schema::create('clients', function(Blueprint $table) {

        // Table engine
        $table->engine = 'InnoDB';

        // Increments
        $table->increments('id');

        // Relationships

        // Fields
        $table->string('name');

        // Timestamps
        $table->timestamps();

        // Soft deletes
        $table->softDeletes();

    });


        Schema::create('projects', function(Blueprint $table) {

        // Table engine
        $table->engine = 'InnoDB';

        // Increments
        $table->increments('id');

        // Relationships
        $table->integer ('client_id');

        // Fields
        $table->string('name');

        // Timestamps
        $table->timestamps();

        // Soft deletes
        $table->softDeletes();

        // Indexes
        $table->index('client_id');


    });

Many thanks.

Answer 1

This was solved by using the withTrashed() method when defining the relation in the model.

Original code:

public function client() {
    return $this->belongsTo('Client');
}

Solution:

public function client() {
    return $this->belongsTo('Client')->withTrashed();
}

Many thanks to Glad to Help.