Improve automatic detaching / deletion of relations

[mjauvin]

First step in Fixing wintercms/winter#386

Related to wintercms/winter#972

When deleting/soft-deleting & restoring a model relations, we need a separate case for relations using a pivot table.

[mjauvin]

@xyzqtc @arvislacis welcome to join the discussion

[mjauvin]

I tested this with success on a model with a belongsToMany relation, both deleting and restoring the model soft-deleted and restored the related models in the pivot table.

[mjauvin]

@arvislacis do you mind creating a PR in the main winter repo to address the issue I mentioned in this PR description?

Thanks!

[arvislacis]

@mjauvin I added wintercms/winter#972 PR but it's not working for me - delete_at column is not being updated when deleting User and columns are fully deleted from backend_users_groups pilot table but maybe I am missing some critical part here. Feel free to comment on my PR.

[mjauvin]

@arvislacis did you properly copy the SoftDelete trait from my PR to your local storm folder?

[arvislacis]

@mjauvin I am pretty sure I did, I copied full RAW file of this PR to my local copy. But I will re-check this tomorrow.

[mjauvin]

And how did you verify it's not working exactly ?

[arvislacis]

@mjauvin Some updates on this:

1. Yes, I applied the patch correctly (to be clear);
2. For testing purposes I added break-point at the end of updatePivotDeletedAtColumn method - so far process executed as expected - the deleted_at column of pivot table was correctly updated with timestamp but if I removed the break-point then somewhere later in the process the relationship entry was still fully removed - I will try to investigate further.

"How did you verify it's not working exactly" - I verified it as described in wintercms/winter#386 (comment) - create new user or add existing user (non default admin) to group, then delete the user, then restore user with WinterCMS admin UI - result is that restored user entry has no group relationships.

[arvislacis]

@mjauvin I did some further debugging but unfortunately didn't find root cause of pivot table relationship being still deleted - it looks like that after the softDelete another delete operation is happening (maybe on User model itself which triggers pivot relationships to be still deleted).

Anyways, I would suggest to repeat user deletion and restoration operations with WinterCMS back-end as described here: wintercms/winter#386 (comment)

[mjauvin]

@arvislacis I found the problem, the Backend User model extends Storm's Auth/User model which has a afterDelete method shown below:

    /**
     * Delete the user groups
     * @return void
     */
    public function afterDelete()
    {   
        if ($this->hasRelation('groups')) {
            $this->groups()->detach();
        }
    }

[mjauvin]

So just override that method as an empty method in Winter's model and that resolves the issue.

In your PR, add a comment that explains why the method is overriden and empty.

[mjauvin]

Actually, we might want to remove that afterDelete method in Storm's model since it's already done by default in Database/Model...

@LukeTowers or @bennothommo can you confirm that we should remove the afterDelete method in Storm\Auth\Models\User ?

[arvislacis]

@mjauvin Nice find! I can confirm that applying the latest changes fixes the wintercms/winter#386

For me it looks like afterDelete can be safely removed ad now we are soft deleting group relationships.

[mjauvin]

Yeah, I made a fix to the base Model class so that the afterDelete method is not required anymore

Addressed

[LukeTowers]

LGTM! @bennothommo any final thoughts?

[mjauvin]

@bennothommo I added the hard delete tests you requested.

[arvislacis]

@LukeTowers @mjauvin As this is merged now, what about related PR and issue in winter repo?

[mjauvin]

What do you mean exactly?

[arvislacis]

I mean merging also wintercms/winter#972 and closing wintercms/winter#386 or it will be done with WinterCMS 1.4 release?

[mjauvin]

Yes, theee should be merged and closed soon.