Laravel Eloquent: ordering Many-to-Many query- user favorites first

Question

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My Laravel app returns a list of ships for users to manage. I want to return ships that are "favorited" by the active user before the rest of the ships. eg:

• Best ship (*)
• Ship I manage often (*)
• Another ship
• Beta ship
• Cornelia

I have a many-to-many relationship between User and Ship, where ship->userFavorite returns the users who have "favorited" the ship.

I can imagine 2 solutions, but I'm not sure if they are possible and how to implement them if they are.

1. An orderby query that sorts based on favorite being equal to active user

   $ships = Ship::orderby([ship->userfavorite being equal to Auth::User()], 'ASC')
   ->orderby('name', 'ASC')->get();
   

2. My current solution: I use a wherehas query to return the favorited ships first ($favships), and use another query to return all the ships ($ships). For this solution I would like to remove the favoried ships from the second query. But how can I elegantly remove these ships from the results?

   $user = Auth::user();
   $favships = Ship::wherehas('userFavorite', function($q) use($user)
   {
       $q->where('id', $user->id);
   })->orderBy('name', 'ASC')->get();
   $ships = Ship::orderBy('name', 'ASC')->get();
   

Any help to increase my understanding of this problem would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

you can use

$normalShips= $ships->diff($favships);

But I think you can reduce from 2 queries to 1 query:

//Ship.php
public function currentUserFavorite() {
     $this->userFavorite()->where('id', Auth::user()->id);
}


// get all ships
$ships = Ship::with('currentUserFavorite')->orderBy('name', 'ASC')->get();

// finally
$favships = $ships->where('currentUserFavorite.0.id', Auth::user()->id);
$normalShips = $ships->diff($favships);

// or do a loop 
foreach ($ships as $ship) {
    if ($ship->currentUserFavorite->count() > 0) {
      $favships[] = $ship;
    } else {
      $normalShips[] = $ship;
    }
}