Laravel order by relation column with example

Some examples that demonstrate the usage of Laravel’s orderBy method with relationship columns, which can be applied in Laravel versions 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

In this post, we focus on examples to use Laravel order by relation column. There are many different ways to achieve it.

Below are some examples that demonstrate the usage of Laravel‘s orderBy method with relationship columns. These examples can be applied in Laravel versions 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Example 1: Ordering by a BelongsTo Relationship Column

Consider the scenario where you have a "User" model that belongs to a "Role" model. You can use the orderBy method to sort the users based on the role name in ascending order.

$users = User::with(['role' => function ($q) {
    $q->orderBy('name');
}])->get();

You can use the same code for descending order by adding 'desc' argument to orderBy method as follows,

$users = User::with(['role' => function ($q) {
    $q->orderBy('name', 'desc');
}])->get();

For above example to work properly, you have to define belongsTo relationship of "Role" model inside the "User" model as follows,

public function role(): BelongsTo
{
    return $this->belongsTo(Role::class, 'role_id', 'id');
}

Example 2: Using inner join with relation table

For above scenario, where “User” model that belongs to “Role” model, you can use join method to perform user sorting based on role name as follows,

$users = User::select('*')
                 ->join('roles', 'users.role_id', '=', 'roles.id')
                 ->orderBy('roles.name', 'asc');

As above example, you need to replace the second argument of orderBy method to 'desc' for sort records in descending order. There is no need of any relationship required for this query.

Example 3: Using sortBy() and sortByDesc() methods

You can use sortBy() and sortByDesc() methods to order the records for the same scenario as follows,

$users = User::get()->sortBy(function($query){
    return $query->role->name;
})->all();

In above example, it first get the users collection from the database and then sort them by the provided relation column. For these methods, you have to define belongsTo relationship in "User" model.

You can use sortByDesc() method same as above.

Example 4: Using subquery and whereColumn method

You can also use subqueries to sort records. For the above scenario, you can use subqueries as follows,

$users = User::select('*')
    ->orderBy(Role::select('name')
        ->whereColumn('roles.id', 'users.role_id')
    );

In above example, we have we used subquery from roles table using whereColumn method to get the name of the role of each row of users table. After getting the role name, we used orderBy method to achieve the sorted records.

For sorting records in descending order, you can use the above example with orderByDesc method.

You can use this example, without defining belongsTo relationship in model.

These are some useful examples to order records based on relationship model in Laravel.

How to upload file code using Laravel

To upload a file using Laravel, you can follow these steps:

Create a new form in your Laravel view with an input field for the file:

<form method="POST" action="{{ route('file.upload') }}" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    @csrf

    <input type="file" name="file">

    <button type="submit">Upload</button>
</form>

Define a new route in your routes/web.php file that points to a controller method that will handle the file upload:

Route::post('/file/upload', [App\Http\Controllers\FileController::class, 'upload'])->name('file.upload');

Create a new controller method in FileController that will handle the file upload:

public function upload(Request $request)
{
    // Validate the uploaded file
    $request->validate([
        'file' => 'required|file|max:1024', // limit file size to 1 MB
    ]);

    // Store the uploaded file in the storage/app/public directory
    $path = $request->file('file')->store('public');

    // Generate a URL for the uploaded file
    $url = Storage::url($path);

    // Redirect back with a success message
    return back()->with('success', 'File uploaded successfully: ' . $url);
}

In the upload() method, we first validate that the uploaded file meets our requirements (in this case, it must be a file and not exceed 1 MB in size). We then use the store() method on the uploaded file to store it in the storage/app/public directory. This directory is publicly accessible, so we can generate a URL for the file using the url() method on the Storage facade. Finally, we redirect back to the form with a success message that includes the URL of the uploaded file.

You can now test the file upload functionality by navigating to the form and selecting a file to upload. If the file meets the validation requirements, it will be uploaded and a success message will be displayed. You can then access the uploaded file at the generated URL.

Finding bugs using PHPStan as a Static Analyzer

With PHP being an interpreted language it has a downside when it comes to finding bugs in your code. It will not show you errors in your software until you actually run it. PHPStan tries to solve this problem by doing static analysis on your code. It was recently created by Ondrej Mirtes.

Running PHPStan will tell you about bugs in your codebase almost instantly (yes, it’s very fast). At the time of writing this article, PHPStan currently checks your code on:

  • The existence of classes and interfaces in an instance of, catch type hints, other language constructs, and even annotations. PHP does not do this and just stays silent instead.
  • Existence of variables while respecting scopes of branches and loops.
  • Existence and visibility of called methods and functions.
  • Existence and visibility of accessed properties and constants.
  • Correct types assigned to properties.
  • The correct number and types of parameters are passed to constructors, methods, and functions.
  • Correct types returned from methods and functions.
  • The correct number of parameters passed to sprintf/printf calls is based on format strings.
  • Useless casts like (string) ‘foo’.
  • Unused constructor parameters – they can either be deleted or the author forgot to use them in the class code.
  • That only objects are passed to the clone keyword.

As you can see, it contains a lot of useful checks which will warn you of potential bugs before you even run your code.

Installing PHPStan

Installing PHPStan is as easy as including it in your project through composer:

$ composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan

We can now run PHPStan from the base directory of our project:

$ vendor/bin/phpstan analyze -l 4 src

A breakdown of this command:

  • vendor/bin/phpstan is the executable
  • analyze tells PHPStan to analyze all files in the given directories
  • -l 4 means that we want to analyse on the most strict level
  • src is the directory we want to analyse

Try running this in your own project and see what kind of potential errors are living in your codebase.

Integrating PHPStan into CI

It’s super easy to use PHPStan in Continuous Integration. For most of my personal projects, I use TravisCI. Since we’ve included PHPStan as a dev-dependency in our composer.json file we just have to add the PHPStan executable to the scripts that the CI-software needs to run.

For TravisCI, this means just changing the default script in a .travis.yml like this:

language: php
php:
  - '8.0'
install: composer install

# Simply add these lines
script:
    - vendor/bin/phpunit
    - vendor/bin/phpstan analyse src tests --level=4

The default script that TravisCI runs for PHP projects is simply phpunit. Now we’ve added PHPStan to it. If PHPStan finds any errors within your project, the build will fail.

Update a bunch of images at once and export them as separate images using GIMP

Scaling of images can be achieved without using any scripts/extensions, but to export all images as separate image files, we need to install a plugin in GIMP named ‘Export Layers’.

You can download this plugin from the following link,

https://khalim19.github.io/gimp-plugin-export-layers/

This plugin is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. For Windows, it can be installed using an executable file.

After installation of this plugin, restart GIMP.

Now, that we have the plugin installed, there is a very simple way to accomplish this task using the following easy steps.

  1. File > Open as layers to select all images to perform a specific task (This is one single action since the file selector allows the selection of multiple images)
  2. Image > Scale image to 75×75 to scale all layers together (We can perform many different actions similar to scaling like transforming, resizing, cropping, etc.)
  3. File > Export Layers will open a dialog that appears allows you to choose the output folder and file extension.
Export Layers Dialog Box

The above steps will save all your image layers to separate files. This could reduce so many steps of similar tasks.

You can perform many different actions like transforming, cropping, resizing, etc. using same steps.

What are ORM Frameworks?

ORM is a short form of Object Relational Mapping, which means as ORM framework is written specifically in OOP (object-oriented programming) language (like PHP, C#, Java, etc…) and it is like a wrapper around a relational database (like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc…). So, ORM is basically mapping objects to relational tables.

What does an ORM framework do?

The ORM framework generates objects (as in OOP) that virtually map the tables in a database. So, any programmer could use these objects to interact with the database without writing an optimized SQL code.

For example:

We have 2 tables in a database:

  • Products
  • Orders

The ORM framework would create 2 objects corresponding to the above tables (like products_object and orders_object) with little configuration, which will handle all the database interactions. So, if you want to add a new product to the products table, you would have to use the products_object and save() method like below,

product = new products_object("Refrigerator","Electronics");
product.save();

You can see, how much easier an ORM framework can make things. No need to write any SQL syntax. And the application code would be very clean.

Some other advantages of using ORM frameworks

1. Syncing between OOP language and the relational database data types is always creating a problem. Sometimes variable data types have to be converted properly to insert into the database. A good ORM framework will take care of these conversions.

2. Using an ORM will create a consistent code base for your application since no SQL statements are written in the code. This makes it easier to write and debug any application, especially if more programmers are using same code base.

3. ORM frameworks will shield your application from SQL injection attacks since the framework will be filtering the data before any operation in the database.

4. Database Abstraction; Switching databases for the application is easier as, ORM will take care of writing all the SQL code, data type conversions etc …

When to use an ORM framework?

An ORM framework becomes more useful as the size and complexity of the project increases. An ORM framework may be overkilling an application on a simple database with 5 tables and 5-6 queries to be used for the application.

Consider the use of ORM when:

  • 3 or more programmers are working on an application.
  • Application database consists of 10+ tables.
  • The application is using 10+ queries.

About 80-90% of application queries can be handled by the ORM generated objects. It is inevitable that at some point straight SQL query is required, which can’t be handled by ORM generated objects.

In fact, ORM frameworks often have their own *QL query language that looks a lot like SQL. Doctrine, a popular PHP based ORM framework has DQL (Doctrine Query Language) and the very popular Hibernate (used in the Java and .Net world) has HQL. Going even further, Hibernate allows writing straight SQL if need be.

ORM Frameworks for PHP programmers

  • CakePHP, ORM, and framework for PHP 5
  • CodeIgniter, a framework that includes an ActiveRecord implementation
  • Doctrine, open source ORM for PHP 5.3.X
  • FuelPHP, ORM, and framework for PHP 5.3. Based on the ActiveRecord pattern.
  • Laravel, a framework that contains an ORM called “Eloquent” an ActiveRecord implementation.
  • Maghead, a database framework designed for PHP7 includes ORM, Sharding, DBAL, SQL Builder tools etc.
  • Propel, ORM and query-toolkit for PHP 5, inspired by Apache Torque
  • Qcodo, ORM, and framework for PHP 5
  • QCubed, A community-driven fork of Qcodo
  • Redbean, ORM layer for PHP 5, creates and maintains tables on the fly
  • Yii, ORM, and framework for PHP 5. Based on the ActiveRecord pattern.
  • Zend Framework, a framework that includes a table data gateway and row data gateway implementations. ZendDb