On delete cascade for self-referencing table
Assuming you're keeping your FOREIGN KEY
constraint in place, you cannot fix the issue in a FOR DELETE
trigger. FOR
triggers (also known as AFTER
triggers) fire after the activity has taken place. And a foreign key will prevent a row from being deleted if it has references. Foreign key checks occur before deletion.
What you need is an INSTEAD OF
trigger. You also need to bear in mind that your current trigger only tried to deal with one "level" of referencing. (So, if row 3 references row 2 and row 2 references row 1, and you delete row 1, your trigger only tried to remove row 2)
So, something like:
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[T_comment_Trigger]
ON [dbo].[Comments]
INSTEAD OF DELETE
AS
;WITH IDs as (
select id from deleted
union all
select c.id
from Comments c
inner join
IDs i
on
c.ParentID = i.id
)
DELETE FROM Comments
WHERE id in (select id from IDs);
If there are other (non-self-referencing) cascading foreign key constraints, they all have to be replaced by actions in this trigger. In such a case, I'd recommend introducing a table variable to hold the list of all IDs that will eventually be deleted from the Comments
table:
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[T_comment_Trigger]
ON [dbo].[Comments]
INSTEAD OF DELETE
AS
declare @deletions table (ID varchar(7) not null);
;WITH IDs as (
select id from deleted
union all
select c.id
from Comments c
inner join
IDs i
on
c.ParentID = i.id
)
insert into @deletions(ID)
select ID from IDs
-- Delete from FK referenced table
DELETE FROM OtherTable
WHERE CommentID in (select ID from @deletions)
--This delete comes last
DELETE FROM Comments
WHERE id in (select ID from @deletions);