Laravel 5.4: Re-assign a soft-deleted record

Question

Using soft-deletes in Laravel 5.4. When I try to create an record that already has been created but soft-deleted I get the message "The xxx has already been taken". What is the best way to be able handle the event when a user attempts to save a record that has already has been soft deleted?

I have been trying to capture this event in the store method of the controller but the store method does not get called if the record already exists - AFAIK.

In my use case I have radios that can be associated to only one user at a time but can be unassigned eg soft-deleted and then reassigned to another user in the future.

Answer 1

You can restore() to restore a soft deleted model:

App\User::withTrashed()->where('id', $user_id)->restore();

Restoring Soft Deleted Models