Sorting Data by Clicking Column Headings

In this tutorial, we will improve the posts table by adding the sorting feature.

Back-end: Sorting in Laravel

We will start from the back-end.

app/Http/Controllers/Api/PostController.php:

class PostController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $orderColumn = request('order_column', 'created_at'); 
        $orderDirection = request('order_direction', 'desc'); 
 
        $posts = Post::with('category')
            ->when(request('category'), function (Builder $query) {
                $query->where('category_id', request('category'));
            })
            ->orderBy($orderColumn, $orderDirection) 
            ->paginate(10);
 
        return PostResource::collection($posts);
    }
}

We will pass the order_column and order_direction as parameters from the URL. The default values will be "created_at" and "desc".

Now we need to add validation for security reasons, to check if those parameters have valid values.

app/Http/Controllers/Api/PostController.php:

class PostController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $orderColumn = request('order_column', 'created_at');
        if (! in_array($orderColumn, ['id', 'title', 'created_at'])) { 
            $orderColumn = 'created_at';
        } 
        $orderDirection = request('order_direction', 'desc');
        if (! in_array($orderDirection, ['asc', 'desc'])) { 
            $orderDirection = 'desc';
        } 
 
        $posts = Post::with('category')
            ->when(request('category'), function (Builder $query) {
                $query->where('category_id', request('category'));
            })
            ->orderBy($orderColumn, $orderDirection)
            ->paginate(10);
 
        return PostResource::collection($posts);
    }
}

Composable Parameters and Vue Variables

Now, similarly as we did with the category, we need to...