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 th

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.

Answer 3

This is the best approach

        'email' => 'required|email|unique:users,email,NULL,id,deleted_at,NULL',

It give you this query

select count(*) as aggregate from `users` where `email` = ? and `deleted_at` is null

Answer 4

Your Eloquent model should have the $softDeletes property set. If so, then when you perform a WHERE check, like User::where('username', 'jimbob'), Eloquent will automatically add in the query WHERE deleted_at IS NULL... which excludes soft deleted items.

Answer 5

Laravel offers "Additional Where Clauses".

My url validation rule (from the update model method) looks like this:

$rules['url'] = 'required|unique:pages,url,'.$page->id.',id,deleted_at,NULL';

This means that the url must be unique, must ignore the current page and ignore the pages where deleted_at id not NULL.

Hope this helps.