Soft deleting is a relatively common pattern which lets you hide records instead of deleting them. It can be configured on a per-model level. It works with models using both ActiveRecord and MongoId ORMs

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'soft_deletable', git: 'https://github.com/Material-Dev/soft_deletable'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install soft_deletable --source https://github.com/Material-Dev/soft_deletable

SoftDelete works by setting soft_deleted_at to Time.now. Make sure your model has a datetime soft_deleted_at column. And include the module into your active_record class:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  include SoftDeletable

  ...
end

myModel.soft_delete! sets soft_deleted_at: Time.now and returns myModel.

You can also pass an optional block of code as argument to do something little extra after the record is soft deleted. For example this can be useful if you want to remove a record form elastic search index once it is soft deleted.

Exa:

myModel.soft_delete! { ElasticSearch.remove_index(self) }

By default, SoftDeletable uses a default_scope. There is a exclude_soft_deleted scope which is same as default scope. To query soft deleted records we also have a scope named soft_deleted.

You can also restore soft deleted records using

myModel.restore_soft_delete

After checking out the repo, run bundle install to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Material-Dev/soft_deletable.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.