Laravel 8: issues with dateTime (DataTables & Charts)

Question

This issue is happening across the entire application...

I have datatables & charts:

1. Datatables don't sort by dateTime correctly, aka Started Column.

2. Charts always starts with the latest date...not by order:

I am using Carbon for datatables like this:

->editColumn('startDateTime', function ($report) {
   return Carbon::parse($report->startDateTime)->format('d M, Y');
})

For the charts, returning data as json then format the date:

$data = TrafficViolation::select('id', 'violationDateTime')
            ->orderBy('violationDateTime')
            ->get()
            ->groupBy(function($data) {
                return Carbon::parse($data['violationDateTime'])->format('M');
            });

The column type of these dates are DateTime in the database.

What's frustrating is that there is a datatable called Audit Log that came with the theme (Metronic 8) and it's sorting the date correctly here (created at):

And looking to its controller:

->editColumn('created_at', function (Activity $model) {
    return $model->created_at->format('d M, Y H:i:s');
})

Looking at the Model there isn't anything related to Carbon or date functions there, noting that the data type of created_at is timestamp.

I tried:

• Changing data type to timestamp instead of datetime.
• Copying the same code of audit log, no need for Carbon, I get an error format() unknown.

Answer 1

To me it looks like you are overcomplicating things, why don't you just sortByDesc if you need the newest results first I do not understand. You can do this like so:

First in you TrafficValidation model add a casts to datetime

protected $casts = [
    'violationDateTime' => 'datetime',
];

Then where you return the query just do

$data = TrafficViolation::select('id', 'violationDateTime')
        ->orderByDesc('violationDateTime')
        ->get()
        ->groupBy(function($data) {
            return Carbon::parse($data->violationDateTime)->format('M');
        });

And the reason audit log works for sorting is because it by default doesnt look at all at your query sorting, it takes the data and sorts it by itself