Quite an often situation in real-life projects that you have to order lists by a certain condition. For example, countries/cities in alphabetical order everywhere. Is there a way to avoid adding "orderBy" every time we make a list for a dropdown? Apparently, it's pretty easy - we can use Global Scopes.
Let's say we have a model City with field name, and we need to order all the lists by name. Here's what function we add to our model - we override a boot() method:
protected static function boot()
{
parent::boot();
// Order by name ASC
static::addGlobalScope('order', function (Builder $builder) {
$builder->orderBy('name', 'asc');
});
}
Also we need to add this on top:
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
Ok, so what do we see here? Method addGlobalScope is getting anonymous function as a parameter, where we actually tell the system what condition to add to all operations with Query Builder.
In reality, if you call City::all() from this point, it will actually execute this query:
select * from cities order by name asc
For more complex situations, you can change that anonymous function to a separate Scope class and pass it as a parameter, see official documentation here.
Thank you Povilas! This is exactly what I wanted. I'm always amazed to see how you cover such nitty-gritty things in Laravel.