Laravel Eloquent ORM - Removing rows and all the inner relationships

Question

I have three tables, table1, table2, and table3. table1 is one-to-many to table2 and table2 is one-to-many to table3.

I want to invoke Table1::find($id)::delete() and have all the rows from table2 and table3 deleted as well.

I added the following to my tables:

Table1

public function delete()
{
    $this->table2()->delete();
    return parent::delete();
}

Table2

public function delete()
{
    $this->table3()->delete();
    return parent::delete();
}

However, my rows from table3 are not deleted. Table3's rows get deleted if I manually call the delete function from the model table2. The way I have written the code, shouldn't the delete() function from table2 be called when table1 calls it?

Answer 1

You can't call delete() on the collection, neither load far related collection on the query builder, to remove related models, so what you need is this:

// Table1 model
public function delete()
{
  $this->table2->each(function ($model2) {
    $model2->table3()->delete();
  });

  $this->table2()->delete();
  return parent::delete();
}

Answer 2

I think this will delete sequentially all related ones:

// Table1
public function delete()
{
    $this->table2()->delete();
    $this->table2()->table3()->delete();
    return parent::delete();
}

Answer 3

I found this from laracasts and found it useful for me. Let me paste the answer here: So I have two models - User and Property User.php

public function properties()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Property');
    }

Property.php

public function user()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
    }

Thus, if I want to delete a particular user, and of course, I don't want any his properties to be retained in the database:

public function destroy($id)
    {
        $user = User::findOrFail($id);

        $user->properties()->delete();

        $user->delete();

        return [
            'message' => 'Delete Complete!'
        ];
    }

I hope you or anyone else finds this useful! Regards :)

Source: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/eloquent/laravel-delete-model-with-all-relations