# 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 Role model and the HasRolesAndPermissions 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 when a model that uses soft deleting is soft deleted, so it keeps its roles and permissions when it's restored. When you force delete it, the listeners delete its pivot data:

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

// Soft delete: the role keeps its users and permissions.
$role->delete();
$role->restore();

// Force delete: the role's users and permissions are removed from the pivot tables.
$role->forceDelete();

While a role is soft deleted, the checks ignore it: its users don't have it nor its permissions until it's restored.