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 the database.
When trying to validate the new user's data, you will get a validation error, because of the existing email.
I made some kind of extra validation within my Controllers, but wouldn't it be nice to have it all within the Model?
Would you suggest creating a custom validation rule?
As I haven't found a clean solution now, I am interessted in how others solved this problem.
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.
You can validate passing extra conditions:
'unique:users,deleted_at,NULL'
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
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.
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.
