Laravel : Delete all records that are not in array

Question

I have a datepicker calendar in my views, and basically I need to synchronize the selected dates (that I send in ajax) with a BoxDeliveryDate model (which only has one column named "date").

So in my Controller I was able to write a pretty nice method to only create a new record if one the selected dates is not yet stored in the database, like this :

foreach (Request::get('dates') as $date) {
        $date_formated = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date));
        BoxDeliveryDate::firstOrCreate(['date'=>$date_formated]);
    }

Now, if the user de-select one the dates in the datepicker, later, and synchronize, I need to delete it from the database.

Is there a nice way to do that in Laravel ? In other words, to delete every record of the table that are NOT in my Request::get('dates') ?

Also, I searched for a simple way to synchronize everything with only one method, but couldn't find anything.

Thanks for helping !

Answer 1

You can use whereNotIn() for that:

BoxDeliveryDate::whereNotIn('date', Request::get('dates'))->delete();

Note that this will not trigger any model events nor will it work with soft delete. Also, depending on the format of dates you might have to format the array before passing it to whereNotIn().

Also I believe it should be Request::input('dates') but it's possible that both actually works...