Laravel Soft Delete Unique column name - php

Question

Suppose I have category table and I have used soft delete on it. Now first time I have added one category "Test" after that I have delete this category so it will update my deleted_at column from the database.
Now when again I am trying to add category with name "Test" it is saying me that this name has been taken. I have tried with rules which are posted Here.
But it is not working. I have used trait in my model. Below is my model code.
<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Validator as Validator;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletingTrait;
class Category extends \Eloquent {
use SoftDeletingTrait;
protected $dates = ['deleted_at'];
/**
* Guarded fields which are not mass fillable
*
* #var array
*/
protected $guarded = array('id');
/**
* Name of the table used
*
* #var string
*/
protected $table = 'travel_categories';
/**
* Validating input.
*
* #param array $input
* #return mixed (boolean | array)
*/
public static function validate($input, $id = null) {
$rules = array(
'name' => array('required','min:2','max:100','regex:/[a-zA-z ]/','unique:travel_categories,name,NULL,id,deleted_at,NULL'),
'description' => 'Required|Min:2',
'image' => 'image'
);
if ($id) {
$rules['name'] = 'Required|Between:3,64|Unique:travel_categories,name,'.$id;
}
$validation = Validator::make($input,$rules);
return ($validation->passes())?true : $validation->messages();
}
}

Answer 1

Did you understand the soft deleting purpose? It will only flag the data to be inactive. It will be there though.
So, if you define the values of that column must be unique, it is right you could not create other one alike.
If it needs to be unique, so you should restore and update the data.
If it can have many ones, so you should remove the unique key applied on it (and call it by relationship for instance).
Look at: Laravel Eloquent Soft Deleting

Answer 2

First: I don't understand a couple of things. Are you trying to validate for create and update? Then why do you allow name to be of length 2 till 100 for creation, and only 3 till 64 for after updates?
Second: I recommend dropping this:
protected $dates = ['deleted_at'];
I don't see the goal of that.
Third, and I'm getting to the point here, what are you trying to do? I guess, what you are trying to do with this filter 'unique:travel_categories,name,NULL,id,deleted_at,NULL' is to check the uniqueness of the name among the active categories. In that case, that should work.

Answer 3

As noted above, a unique index on [category, deleted_at] will not work because when deleted_at is null, many SQL RDBMS will allow multiple records to be inserted despite a unique index existing.
In case anyone is interested I have now created a Laravel extension to handle the SQL unique-index constraints correctly: https://packagist.org/packages/tranzakt/laravel-softdeletesunique
If anyone tries this, please give feedback on Github, thanks.

Answer 4

I know this question is old, but I had a similar issue and I stumbled upon this. I wanted to mention how I fixed it for anyone, who is reading it in the future. The problem I had was that Laravel did not allow me to insert a value in a unique column when there was an old record with the same value, but was deleted using soft_delete.
To summarize, the goal is to ignore old soft deleted records for a unique column when inserting a new record. The solution I found is in the migration for the table. For example, let us assume we have these columns:
category - unique
deleted_at - keeps tracks of the deleted rows
Both should be specified as unique in the migration like so:
Schema::create('table_name', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->string("category");
$table->softDeletes();
$table->unique(["category", "deleted_at"]);
});
Side note: If you already have the table like I did, you need to change the migration and create the table again (obviously the data will be lost):
Remove the table
Change the migration
Remove the record about it from the migrations table
run "php artisan migrate" to create the table again