Cascading soft deletes for the Laravel PHP Framework

Implementation

1. Add the JoggApp\LaravelCascadeSoftDeletes\Traits\CascadeSoftDeletes trait to parents models.
2. Set protected $cascadeSoftDeletes to an array of child relationships for soft deletes to cascade down to.

Code Samples

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;
use JoggApp\LaravelCascadeSoftDeletes\Traits\CascadeSoftDeletes;

class User extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes, CascadeSoftDeletes;

    protected $cascadeSoftDeletes = [
        'posts',
    ];

    public function posts()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Post::class);
    }
}

Now you can delete an App\Models\User record, and any associated App\Models\Post records will be deleted. If the App\Models\Post record implements the CascadeSoftDeletes trait as well, it's children will also be deleted and so on.

$user = App\Models\User::find($userId);
$user->delete(); // Soft delete the user, which will also trigger the delete() method on any posts and their children.