# Soft Deleting

The default migration takes advantage of onDelete('cascade') clauses within the pivot tables to remove relations when a parent record is deleted. If for some reason you can not use cascading deletes in your database, the LaratrustRole and LaratrustPermission classes, and the HasRole trait include event listeners to manually delete records in relevant pivot tables.

In the interest of not accidentally deleting data, the event listeners will not delete pivot data if the model uses soft deleting. However, due to limitations in Laravel's event listeners, there is no way to distinguish between a call to delete() versus a call to forceDelete(). For this reason, before you force delete a model, you must manually delete any of the relationship data (unless your pivot tables uses cascading deletes). For example:

$role = Role::findOrFail(1); // Pull back a given role

// Regular Delete
$role->delete(); // This will work no matter what

// Force Delete
$role->users()->sync([]); // Delete relationship data
$role->permissions()->sync([]); // Delete relationship data

$role->forceDelete(); // Now force delete will work regardless of whether the pivot table has cascading delete