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Laravel - Shuffle Merge and Paginate Collection

I am struggling with a pretty difficult thing and hope you can help me out. Right now I've got the following:

$ads = Ad::where('status', 1)
    ->whereIn('ad_type', [1, 2, 3])
    ->where('expire_at', '>', date('Y-m-d H:i:s'))
    ->where('special_ad', 'standard_ad')
    ->orderByRaw(DB::raw("FIELD(ad_type,2,3,1)"));

Info: This is working because it is an Eloquent Collection and I can Paginate this (needed for my Infinite Scroll)

But now I want to shuffle the ad_types in itself, meaning: ad_type 1 could have, let's say, 30 entries. They will all be returned in the usual order. I want to shuffle those 30 every time I run this query. I thought about doing ->toArray(); but then again, no pagination (Pagination only works on Eloquent Queries right?)

Then I thought, hey, let's merge this. But as soon as I did that, the returned collection is no longer an Eloquent Collection but a Support Collection (right? I am not 100% sure it is a Support Collection) thus the Pagination does not work anymore.

I read upon many posts as how to solve this problem, and figured out one solution may be to "create my own paginator instance" But heck, I am not that good yet. I do really not know, even after studying the laravel documentation, how to create my own paginator.

Important Infos you might need: Using Laravel 5.2 $ads are dynamical, meaning depending on the case, the requests sent with Ajax, the query might differ at a later point (something might get included).

Thank you very much for your time reading this and hopefully, you can help me and future readers by solving this particular problem.

Greetings, and a great weekend to all of you.

Solution

  • Firstly just to note: Pagination does not only work for database queries. You can manually paginate using LengthAwarePaginator but manually is the keyword here. The query builder (not Eloquent) can do it automatically for you using paginate.

    You can "shuffle" the results by doing something like

    $ads = Ad::where('status', 1)
   ->whereIn('ad_type', [1, 2, 3])
   ->where('expire_at', '>', date('Y-m-d H:i:s'))
   ->where('special_ad', 'standard_ad')
   ->orderByRaw("FIELD(ad_type,2,3,1)")
   ->orderByRaw("RAND()");

    This will order by the ad_type field first and order by a random number (different for every row) as a secondary sort.