File: README — Documentation for soft

SoftDestroyable

Allows one to annotate an ActiveRecord module as being soft_destroyable.

Why another soft_destroy implementation?

This gem was inspired by acts_as_paranoid and rails3_acts_as_paranoid, both of which are great gems. I found that rails3_acts_as_paranoid did not handle associations the way I wanted (at least at the time I wrote this), so I wrote this implementation instead.

Details

This changes the behavior of the destroy method to become a soft-destroy, which will set the deleted_at attribute to Time.now, and the deleted attribute to true It exposes the revive method to reverse the effects of destroy (for :dependent => :destroy associations only). It also exposes the destroy! method which can be used to really destroy an object and it’s associations.

revive will not revive child associations which have been destroyed by actions other a destroy of the parent. This requires the column attribute revive_with_parent.

Standard ActiveRecord destroy callbacks are not called, however you can override before_soft_destroy, after_soft_destroy, and before_destroy! on your soft_destroyable models.

Standard ActiveRecord dependent options :destroy, :restrict, :nullify, :delete_all, and :delete are supported and will behave as expected. revive will not undo the effects of nullify, delete_all, and delete. restrict is effected by the deleted? state. In other words, deleted child models will not raise a restriction when destroying the parent.

The delete operation is not modified by this module.

The operations: destroy, destroy!, and revive are automatically delegated to the dependent association records. in a single transaction.

Scopes are provided for deleted and not_deleted. The standard all scope is not polluted, so will still return all records, deleted or not.

Author: Michael Kintzer

Examples

Migrate your model to add deleted and deleted_at attributes. There are helpers provided for this:


  create_table :mytable do |t|
    t.soft_destroyable
  end


  change_table :mytable do |t|
    t.soft_destroyable
  end

Annotate your model to be soft_destroyable


  class Parent
    has_many :children, :dependent => :restrict
    has_many :animals, :dependent => :nullify
    soft_destroyable
    ...

That’s it!

Testing

make sure you have rails and sqlite gems installed.
rake test

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request

Contributors

Mack Talcott