Paranoia

Paranoia is a re-implementation of acts_as_paranoid for Rails 3, using much, much, much less code.

You would use either plugin / gem if you wished that when you called destroy on an Active Record object that it didn't actually destroy it, but just "hid" the record. Paranoia does this by setting a deleted_at field to the current time when you destroy a record, and hides it by scoping all queries on your model to only include records which do not have a deleted_at field.

Installation & Usage

Put this in your Gemfile:

gem 'paranoia'

Then run bundle. Done.

Updating is as simple as bundle update paranoia.

Rails 3

In your Gemfile:

gem 'paranoia'

Then run:

bundle install

Rails 2:

In your config/environment.rb:

config.gem 'paranoia'

Then run:

rake gems:install

Run your migrations for the desired models

class AddDeletedAtToClient < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :clients, :deleted_at, :datetime
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column :clients, :deleted_at
  end
end

Usage

In your model:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid

  ...
end

Hey presto, it's there!

If you want a method to be called on destroy, simply provide a before_destroy callback:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_paranoid

  before_destroy :some_method

  def some_method
    # do stuff
  end

  ...
end

You can replace the older acts_as_paranoid methods as follows:

find_with_deleted(:all)       # => unscoped
find_with_deleted(:first)     # => unscoped.first
find_with_deleted(id)         # => unscoped.find(id)

find_only_deleted(:all)       # => only_deleted
find_only_deleted(:first)     # => only_deleted.first
find_only_deleted(id)         # => only_deleted.find(id)

License

This gem is released under the MIT license.