Let’s imagine a simple situation – you need to write an Eloquent query and order the result by the difference of two columns. Or some other calculation. Time to apply a raw query!
Simple orderBy:
User::where('created_at', '>', '2016-01-01')
->orderBy('updated_at', 'desc')
->get();
Now, what if we need to order by the difference between updated_at and created_at? It looks like this:
User::where('created_at', '>', '2016-01-01')
->orderByRaw('(updated_at - created_at) desc')
->get();
This orderByRaw() method, which is not mentioned in official Laravel documentation, will apply order by clause without changing anything in it, so final query will be:
select * from users
where created_at > '2016-01-01'
order by (updated_at - created_at) desc
Hope that helps!
