Many To Many Join

Coming soon...

Title: Leading the Fleet: Ordering Starships by Droid Count

Alright folks, ever wondered which starship in your fleet has the most droids? Well, let's find out! We're going to list our ships in descending order based on their droid count. The ones with the most droids get the top spot. Sounds cool, right? Buckle up, let's do this!

First things first, we need to dive into our Source Controller, specifically the Main Controller. Currently, our query is a little something like this:

$ships = $repository->findIncomplete()

Click into that bad boy real quick. We're going to give it a new, snazzy name: findIncompleteOrderedByDroidCount(). Copy that, swing back to the controller, and replace the old method name with our shiny new one.

Oh, look at that! We've changed nothing yet, so a quick refresh gives us the same results. It's always a nice feeling, isn't it? It's like we're sneaking around in our own code, not breaking anything. But now, things are about to get a little more exciting.

Title: Joining Forces with Droids

We need to order our starships by their droid count. To do this, we're going to join across the join table all the way to droid, group by starship, and then count the droids. Sounds like a party, right?

Kick things off with the join. In Starship Repository, add a left join. The coolest part? We're not going to think about the join table or database. Nope, we're just focusing on the relationships in Docker. So we're joining across s, which is our starship, and droids, which we'll alias as droid.

To count the droids, we'll need to add a group by s.id. It's like herding our starships together before counting their droid passengers.

Next up, let's use this orderBy up here, because we don't want to add another one. Replace the existing orderBy with orderBy('COUNT(droid)', 'ASC').

Title: The Droid Count Reveal

After that, hit refresh and boom! At the top, you'll see droids none. But as you scroll down, the droid count increases. If you're brave enough to venture a couple of pages ahead, you'll start seeing starships with two, three, or even four droids. It's like a surprise party with each page!

The key here? There's nothing special about this join. We join across the property, Doctrine handles the rest. It's like having a personal assistant taking care of all the grunt work for us.

If you take a quick peek at the query on this page, you'll see it's handling all the details. It's like a backstage pass to the magic of Doctrine. Search for starship_droid and you'll find the query. Granted, it's a bit like reading ancient runes, but if you format the query, you'll see it's selecting from starship, taking care of the join over to the join table, joining again over to droid, and allowing us to count and order by the count on that droid table. It's a pretty slick way of handling all those joins behind the scenes.

And that's it, folks! Nothing mystical or magical here, just another day in the life of a Doctrine join. Now go on, enjoy your ordered list of starships and their droid counts. May the Force be with you!