Laravel 4 - how to use a unique validation rule / unique columns with soft deletes?

Question

Assume, you are trying to create a new user, with a User model ( using soft deletes ) having a unique rule for it's email address, but there exists a trashed user within the database.

When trying to validate the new user's data, you will get a validation error, because of the existing email.

I made some kind of extra validation within my Controllers, but wouldn't it be nice to have it all within the Model?

Would you suggest creating a custom validation rule?

As I haven't found a clean solution now, I am interessted in how others solved this problem.

Answer 1

You can validate passing extra conditions:

'unique:users,deleted_at,NULL'

Answer 2

This sounds like an issue with your business logic rather than a technical problem.

The purpose of a soft delete is to allow for the possibility that the soft-deleted record may be restored in the future. However, if your application needs uniqueness of email (which is completely normal), you wouldn't want to both create a new user with that email address and be able to restore the old one as this would contravene the uniqueness requirement.

So if there is a soft deleted record with the email address for which you are adding as a new record, you should consider instead restoring the original record and applying the new information to it as an update, rather than trying to circumvent the uniqueness check to create a new record.