Eager loading relationships to sort by is not working in Laravel

Question

I am trying to use Eager Loading to dynamically order by relationships in Laravel.

dd(SomeModel::with(['someRelation' => function ($query) {
    $query->orderByDesc('column');
})->toSql());

I'm using dd() and toSql() to try to debug what is happening and this is what I see:

"select * from "some_table" where "some_table"."deleted_at" is null"

No matter if I orderBy('column', 'ASC') or orderBy('column', 'DESC') without the dd or toSql, I get the same output as if it is ignoring the entire eager load.

Am I missing something or doing something wrong? My relation in this case looks like this:

class SomeModel
{
    protected $table = 'some_table'; # for visual aid
    
    public function someRelation(): BelongsTo
    {
        $this->belongsTo(SomeOtherModel::class)->select('id', 'column');
    }
}

FYI, some more debug later. I attempted to try see if the function ever executes, to which it does:

SomeModel::with(['someRelation' => function ($query) {
    $query->orderByDesc('column');
    dd($query->toSql());
});

The dd block executes telling me the function executed and gives me:

"select "id", "name" from "some_other_table" where "some_other_table"."id" in (?, ?) and "some_other_table"."deleted_at" is null order by "name" desc"

Any help appreciated.

Update to check for subqueries SQL:

\DB::enableQueryLog();

SomeModel::with(['someRelation' => function ($test) {
    $test->orderBy('name', 'DESC');
}])->get();

dd(\DB::getQueryLog());

This returns me an empty array:

[]

Answer 1

After reading through the full article as @TimLewis alluded to, I went with the join solution.

SomeModel::query()->select('some_table.id', 'some_table.name') # Only bring back what we need without the join
    ->join('some_other_table', 'some_other_table.id', '=', 'some_table.some_other_table_id')
    ->orderByDesc('column');

Alternatively, you can always leftJoin if you don't expect data all the time, just make some null exception handling.

I actually created an abstract class which has a global scope to do this dynamically in any Model based on a hash-map approach.