How do you delete all relationships for a model?

posted 10 years ago

This seems really simple (and probably is), but it doesn't seem to be covered in the documentation.

I have User objects, that can subscribe to a Category (many-to-many relationship). If I would delete a Category, I want to delete all the relations to all users (like, 'delete from user_subscriptions where category_id = X'). I can't seem to find a nice Eloquent way of doing this.

If I do something like

$category->subscribers()->delete();

I don't delete the relation, but the actual User objects, which is not what I want. Can someone enlighten me on how to remove all relations to an object in some Eloquent-friendly way?

Last updated 2 years ago.

ruk33

replied 10 years ago

Take a look at pivot tables: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#working-with-pivot-tables

Last updated 2 years ago.

tdhsmith

replied 9 years ago

For many-to-many, calling detach with no arguments will detach all:

$category->subscribers()->detach();

You can also use sync to override the entire collection of models and replace it with an empty list:

$category->subscribers()->sync([]);

Both are covered in the docs on many-to-many, but it's very easy to miss a lot of the variants (I don't think that many people even know about sync, for example).

Last updated 9 years ago.

Moderators