Soft Deletes

Introduction

Soft-Deletes are a concept that describes marking certain objects as "deleted" instead of actually deleting them in case you still need to access them at a later point. We implemented soft-deletes using a timestamp field that gets set to the current date and time on deletion. Whenever you query on a repository with soft-deletes enabled the deleted entries are automatically getting filtered out in the query.

Usage

In order to enable soft-deletes for a model you need to give it the @SoftDelete annotation. This will by default use the field "deletedAt" as soft-delete field but you can also give the field name as a parameter to the annotation.

@SoftDelete
class User extends Model {
    /*  */
    @Column
    Timestamp deletedAt;
}

By calling the delete() method it will set the deletedAt timestamp to the current time. This will exclude it from queries which don't include the withDeleted() option. To later restore an entity you can use the restore() method or to finally delete it you can call finalDelete().