I am dealing with similar problem. I am afraid that it cannot be done with Eloquent, but I hope I am wrong. Any help will be highly appreciated.

You can do this using joins (and eager loading data if needed)

Yes but join breaks the nice JSON structure of nested data :( Or can data using joins be somehow formatted in a way that eloquent does?

TorchSK said:

Yes but join breaks the nice JSON structure of nested data :( Or can data using joins be somehow formatted in a way that eloquent does?

You don't have to select joined columns so it really doesn't matter. Imagine this:

Post::join('categories','posts.category_id','=','categories.id')
  ->orderBy('categories.name', 'asc')
  // with('category') if we need to get related categories, uncomment
  ->get(['posts.*']); // get only post table, so the result is just the same

jarektkaczyk said:

TorchSK said:

Yes but join breaks the nice JSON structure of nested data :( Or can data using joins be somehow formatted in a way that eloquent does?

You don't have to select joined columns so it really doesn't matter. Imagine this:

Post::join('categories','posts.category_id','=','categories.id')
 ->orderBy('categories.name', 'asc')
 // with('category') if we need to get related categories, uncomment
 ->get(['posts.*']); // get only post table, so the result is just the same

Wow, this is brilliant! Thanks a lot!

You could also use the sort collection method:

$collection->sort(function($a, $b) {
  $fa = $a->related_obj->field;
  $fb = $b->related_obj->field;
  if ($fa === $fb) return 0;
  return ($fa > $fb) ? 1 : -1;
});

It's the most "elegant" way I found without using query builder...

take a look on this package https://github.com/fico7489/laravel-eloquent-join