The Paranoia gem

If you didn’t know it yet, paranoia is a gem that handles the soft deletion for your ActiveRecord models.

Adding it to your model is straightforward. Given you want to add soft-deletion to your Client model, first run rails generate migration AddDeletedAtToClients deleted_at:datetime:index to add the deleted_at column in the clients table. Then add acts_as_paranoid to your Client model, like in the following snippet:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid
end

From now on, Client#destroy sets the current datetime in the deleted_at column, while Client default scope returns only records which have a nil value for deleted_at.

To really destroy a client, you should use #really_destroy!.
To list all clients (even the deleted ones) you can use Client.with_deleted, while you can use Client.only_deleted to get only deleted records.

Paranoia even follows relationships. So if you are in the following scenario:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :addresses, dependent: :destroy
  acts_as_paranoid
end

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :client
  acts_as_paranoid
end

when you call Client#destroy paranoia will soft-delete all its addresses.

The only problem I found after my setup was with the uniqueness validation. In this scenario:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid
  validates :name,
    :uniqueness => true
end

the uniqueness validator will check among deleted records too, and in my case I did want to check only among not-deleted records.
For this purpose there is a gem called (paranoia_uniqueness_validator)[https://github.com/anthonator/paranoia_uniqueness_validator] that can be used this way:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid
  validates :name,
    :uniqueness_without_deleted => true
end

And it works as expected.

So, easy soft-deletion for all 🙂