Deleting related models one-to-many in Laravel

Question

Is this even possible? In every tutorial that I read there is nothing about deleting, only selecting and inserting related models. This is my problem: I have three levels of nesting. I have classes Package, Level, Lesson and Phase, and their models are below. First one - packages: ``` class Package extends Eloquent { protected $table = 'packages'; public $timestamps = false; public function levels(){ return $this->hasMany('Level', 'package_id'); } ``` } Levels: ``` class Level extends Eloquent { protected $table = 'levels'; public function lessons(){ return $this->hasMany('Lesson', 'level_id'); } public function package(){ return $this->belongsTo('Package', 'package_id'); } ``` } Lessons: class Lesson extends Eloquent { ``` protected $table = 'lessons'; public function phases(){ return $this->hasMany('Phase', 'lesson_id'); } public function level(){ return $this->belongsTo('Level', 'level_id'); } ``` } What I'm trying to do here is to when deleting one package i delete all levels rela…

Accepted Answer

You can approach this in two ways:

Leverage the database to do the deleting for you. You'd add something like this to your migrations for the `lessons`, `levels` and `packages`, respectively:

```
 $table->foreign('level_id')->references('id')->on('levels')->onDelete('cascade');

$table->foreign('lesson_id')->references('id')->on('lessons')->onDelete('cascade');

$table->foreign('package_id')->references('id')->on('packages')->onDelete('cascade');
```

You can overwrite the `delete` method on each model to delete all of its relationships:

```
class Lesson extends Eloquent {

protected $table = 'lessons';

public function phases(){
        return $this->hasMany('Phase', 'lesson_id');
    }

public function level(){
        return $this->belongsTo('Level', 'level_id');
    }

public function delete()    
    {
        DB::transaction(function() 
        {
            $this->level()->delete();
            $this->phases()->delete();
            parent::delete();
        });
    }

}
```

Deleting related models one-to-many in Laravel

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