Category: Troubleshooting

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.

Solved – error while loading shared libraries: libpangox-1.0.so.0: Anydesk on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

After successfully upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS, most of the applications are working perfectly. But, some of the applications behave unusually. Such as, I tried to run the Anydesk application, but it doesn’t launch/start. when I checked the status service, the AnyDesk service was failed and the reason for failing is mentioned in the below error message,

anydesk: error while loading shared libraries: libpangox-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

libpangox-1.0.so.0 is a library used for text layout and rendering the text. Most of the work on Pango-1.0 was done using the GTK+ widget toolkit as a test platform.

So, I ran the command to install it using the apt as follows,

apt install libpangox-1.0-0

But, it gives me the following error,

Package libpangox-1.0-0 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

So, from that we can understand that, libpangox-1.0.so.0 can’t be installed from apt or apt-get. We need to install it manually.

Use the following steps to install libpangox-1.0.so.0 manually,

Step 1. Download the libpangox-1.0 package

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pangox-compat/libpangox-1.0-0_0.0.2-5.1_amd64.deb

Step2: Install the package using apt

sudo apt install ./libpangox-1.0-0_0.0.2-5.1_amd64.deb

Step3: Restart the AnyDesk service

sudo service anydesk restart

After these steps, if you check the AnyDesk service status, it will show active (running).

Error Handling in PHP (Part 2)

Now that we know, how to log errors in any system developed in PHP, we can move to our next section for keeping track of these logged errors. If you haven’t read how to log errors, read part 1 of error handling in PHP.

To keep track of these logged errors, we need to create a script to read those log files in a systematic way. Refer to the below code to read log files,

public function errorLogs($filePath = 'error.log') {

        $fileContent = file($filePath);

        $errorsArray = array();
        if(sizeof($fileContent) == 0) {
            return false;
        }

        foreach($fileContent as $row) {
            $errors = explode(":  ", $row);

            if(empty($errors[1])) continue;
            $errorsArray[] = $errors;
        }

        return array_reverse($errorsArray, true);
}

Explanation:

$fileContent = file($filePath);

This line of code will read the file line by line from the provided file path.

if(sizeof($fileContent) == 0) {
    return false;
}

After reading the file, if the size of the file content is 0 then, the function will return false. So, the purpose of this function is to stop the execution of the function if the provided file is empty and returns false.

foreach($fileContent as $row) {
      $errors = explode(":  ", $row);

      if(empty($errors[1])) continue;
      $errorsArray[] = $errors;
}

This part of the function will loop through the log contents row by row. For each row, it will explode the line with ‘:’ to separate the date and actual error details.

If the error details are empty for any row, it will skip that row. Otherwise, it will collect the errors in another array.

return array_reverse($errorsArray, true);

The last line of the function will reverse the error data and returned the reversed result. So, that we can see the latest errors first.

This way we can create a simple function to display the list of errors in a tabular format from the error log files we generated for each of the modules in the application system.

Error handling in PHP (Part 1)

Error handling is an important part of any developer as it provides vital flaws about the program developed by the developer. So, it becomes very crucial to learn the techniques to manage it.

As a developer, we have been told that you should not show errors on the production server because of the security risk due to the path displayed by the PHP errors displayed on the screen. So, we add the following code for the production server,

ini_set('error_reporting', 0);
error_reporting(0);

ini_set('display_errors', FALSE);

But, without error logs, developers cannot able to know actual problems or flaws in the system. So, rather than hiding errors, developers should store them in the log files. We can achieve this using the following code,

ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('log_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('html_errors', FALSE);
ini_set('error_log', LOG_PATH.'error.log');
ini_set('display_errors', FALSE);

This way, we can manage error logs and hide errors on the production server. We can manage separate log files for the different modules of the project.