Eloquent: order by field

[martinbean]

Could an order by field method by added to Eloquent? Most relational databases allow sorting a field by values, i.e. in MySQL:

SELECT * FROM `plans` ORDER BY FIELD(`interval`, 'day', 'week', 'month', 'year');

I could use orderByRaw() for this, but there are a couple of issues:

• Different databases use different characters for both quoting column names and values. For example, MySQL uses back ticks for columns whereas Postgres uses double quotes; MySQL uses double quotes for values whereas Postgres uses single quotes.
• Some databases don’t have the FIELD() function (i.e. SQLite), so if the current database connection is using the SQLIte driver then the query builder should probably throw a “this feature not available” exception.

Usage-wise, I see it looking like this:

$plans = Plan::orderByField('interval', ['day', 'week', 'month', 'year'])->get();

[andreshg112]

I just created a trait to accomplish this: https://gist.github.com/andreshg112/b359089878bdb2269321838d8921f429

[staudenmeir]

This syntax is only supported by MySQL.

The other databases require a different solution: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1310188/4848587

[martinbean]

@staudenmeir It’s a good job queries are crafted by database-specific grammar classes under the hood, then…