How to implement soft deletes in Doctrine with Symfony?

To implement soft deletes in Doctrine with Symfony, you can follow these steps:

Add a "deletedAt" field to your entity class that will store the date and time the entity was soft deleted. This field should be nullable and have the type "datetime".

/**
 * @ORM\Column(type="datetime", nullable=true)
 */
private $deletedAt;

Create a repository method to retrieve only non-deleted entities. You can use a custom query builder method in your repository class to query for entities that do not have a value set in the "deletedAt" field.

public function findNotDeleted()
{
    $qb = $this->createQueryBuilder('e');
    $qb->andWhere('e.deletedAt IS NULL');

    return $qb->getQuery()->getResult();
}

Override the Symfony's remove method in your controller to set the "deletedAt" field when an entity is soft deleted instead of actually removing it from the database.

public function remove(EntityManager $em, YourEntity $entity)
{
    $entity->setDeletedAt(new \DateTime());
    $em->persist($entity);
    $em->flush();
}

Update your queries to exclude soft deleted entities by default. When querying for entities in your application, always use the custom repository method that retrieves non-deleted entities.

$entities = $repository->findNotDeleted();

By following these steps, you can easily implement soft deletes in Doctrine with Symfony, preserving data integrity and allowing for the possibility of restoring soft deleted entities in the future if needed.