I have a Users and a Groups table in Laravel's Eloquent ORM. There can be multiple users in a group and a user can be in multiple groups, so I use a pivot table to realize the many-to-many relationship. In real, the relationship isn't many-to-many because every user can be in only one group, but the system was designed this way. I soft delete the rows in the Users table so if needed I can restore users later.
The problem is that when I delete a user, the system automatically delete the entry in the pivot table too. This is always one entry. I didn't set it to behave like this, only added the protected $softDelete = true; line to the Users model, so I don't understand why the system automatically delete the pivot entries.
I don't want to soft delete the pivot entries, I want to soft delete only and exclusively the users, and the system shouldn't touch anything else.
I could create my own delete function that set the deleted_at variable to the actual time but this way I couldn't simply turn of the soft delete by changing the true to false if I need this.
Why does the system automatically delete the pivot entries, and how can I turn off this behavior?
Check your database if you are using foreign keys you may have it set to ON UPDATE, ON DELETE "CASCADE". You need to set it up to "NO ACTION"
CONSTRAINT `fk_USER_Address_1` FOREIGN KEY (`userId`) REFERENCES `USER` (`userId`) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE,
to
CONSTRAINT `fk_USER_Address_1` FOREIGN KEY (`userId`) REFERENCES `USER` (`userId`) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE NO ACTION,