Handle unique validation conflicts caused by soft-deleted records

[mohammadrasoulasghari]

Hi Laravel Team 👋,

During my experience working on various projects, I’ve encountered a recurring issue when validating the uniqueness of a field while using Soft Deletes. Specifically, when using Rule::unique for validation, it often leads to unintended conflicts because soft-deleted records are still considered in the validation check. This has caused confusion and bugs in projects where certain records are logically “deleted” but still exist in the database.

To address this issue, I’ve introduced a new method called withSoftDeletes to the Rule::unique class. This method allows developers to exclude soft-deleted records from the unique validation check. By explicitly opting in to this behavior, it ensures that the framework remains opinionated and avoids introducing any breaking changes.

I believe this addition can improve the developer experience by:

1. “Explicit is better than implicit” — This method makes the behavior clear and opt-in, avoiding unexpected side effects.
2. “Don’t repeat yourself (DRY)” — It reduces the repetitive task of manually adding conditions for soft-deleted records.

Usage Example:
Here’s an example of how this method can be used:

use Illuminate\Validation\Rule;

$request->validate([
    'email' => [
        'required',
        'email',
        Rule::unique('users', 'email')->withSoftDeletes(),
    ],
]);

Thank you for considering this PR! 😊

Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.

[antonkomarev]

This field may be named differently in each model.

[shaedrich]

Doesn't DatabaseRule have a withoutTrashed() method?

framework/src/Illuminate/Validation/Rules/DatabaseRule.php

Lines 179 to 190 in 122e5c2

	/**
	* Ignore soft deleted models during the existence check.
	*
	* @param string $deletedAtColumn
	* @return $this
	*/
	public function withoutTrashed($deletedAtColumn = 'deleted_at')
	{
	$this->whereNull($deletedAtColumn);
	return $this;
	}

[shaedrich]

You could use tap() here:

Suggested change

	$this->where(function ($query) use ($model) {
	$deletedAtColumn = $model && method_exists($model, 'getDeletedAtColumn')
	? $model->getDeletedAtColumn()
	: 'deleted_at';
	$query->whereNull($deletedAtColumn);
	});
	return $this;
	return tap($this)->where(function ($query) use ($model) {
	$deletedAtColumn = $model && method_exists($model, 'getDeletedAtColumn')
	? $model->getDeletedAtColumn()
	: 'deleted_at';
	$query->whereNull($deletedAtColumn);
	});

[shaedrich]

You might want to add similar functionality to ignore(), where what is passed can be one of a few options:

framework/src/Illuminate/Validation/Rules/Unique.php

Lines 34 to 44 in 122e5c2

	public function ignore($id, $idColumn = null)
	{
	if ($id instanceof Model) {
	return $this->ignoreModel($id, $idColumn);
	}
	$this->ignore = $id;
	$this->idColumn = $idColumn ?? 'id';
	return $this;
	}

In our case, this would be either a model or the column name directly.