Home Database Implement Soft Delete and Unique validation in Laravel

Implement Soft Delete and Unique validation in Laravel

Implement Soft Delete and Unique validation in Laravel

If you have been using soft delete in your application then you may have come across this situation. When we try to create a new record with the same value for a unique field name, it throws an exception for duplicate records. It’s quite common. In this article, we will learn how we can handle this error efficiently in Laravel.

Here, we will be testing it with users table for email column. First of all, we need to remove unique() constraint from the column.

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->id();
        $table->string('name');
        $table->string('email');    // <-- remove unique() from this column
        $table->timestamp('email_verified_at')->nullable();
        $table->string('password');
        $table->rememberToken();
        $table->timestamps();
    });
}

Refresh the migration to generate the modified table.


php artisan migrate:fresh

Now, we need to create a form request to write our validation logic. Run below command to create a new form request for users table.


php artisan make:request UserRequest

This will generate a UserRequest.php file inside app/Http/Requests/directory. Our main goal is to customize the unique field validation for email. I will add validation logic which looks like below.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Requests;

use Illuminate\Validation\Rule; //<-- import this class
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest;

class UserRequest extends FormRequest
{
    /**
     * Determine if the user is authorized to make this request.
     *
     * @return bool
     */
    public function authorize()
    {
        return true;
    }

    /**
     * Get the validation rules that apply to the request.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function rules()
    {
        return [
            ..........
            'email' => 'required', Rule::unique('users')->whereNull('deleted_at')
            ..........
        ];
    }
}

In the above code, we use Rule class with a unique method which accepts table name i.e. users in our case. Then, we check the condition where deleted_at column is null.

We can also use withoutTrashed method instead of whereNull. Thus, our validation looks like below.

..............

public function rules()
{
    return [
        ..........
        'email' => 'required', Rule::unique('users')->withourTrashed('deleted_at')
        ..........
    ];
}

This is pretty straightforward. What are your thoughts? Don’t forget to drop your comments below.

NO COMMENTS

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Exit mobile version