Symfony 4 Sorting Filtered Array Collection

Question

I am having trouble sorting a collection resulting from a one-to-many relationship that has been filtered. I have a quiz that has questions:

class Quiz
{
/**
 * One quiz has many questions. This is the inverse side.
 * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Question", mappedBy="assessment")
 * @ORM\OrderBy({"num" = "ASC"})
 */
 private $questions;

 public function __construct() {
    $this->questions = new ArrayCollection();
 }

This works as expected. However, when I modify the getter to exclude inactive (soft-deleted) questions, the sort order is lost.

public function getQuestions()
{
    // filter to never return soft deleted questions
    $criteria = Criteria::create()->where(Criteria::expr()->eq("active", true));
    return $this->questions->matching($criteria);
}

In fact, with this getter in place, if I modify the order by clause to a nonexistent column, I do not get an unrecognized field exception as I would expect:

@ORM\OrderBy({"nonexistantcolumn" = "ASC"}) 

This leads me to believe that somehow the criteria filtering is overriding the annotation. Any ideas on how to resolve this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Besides filtering, Criteria can also sort a collection:

public function getQuestions()
{
    // filter to never return soft deleted questions
    $criteria = Criteria::create()
        ->where(Criteria::expr()->eq("active", true))
        ->orderBy(["num" => Criteria::ASC]);
    return $this->questions->matching($criteria);
}

However, consider adding another unfiltered getter since this will prevent you from actually deleting inactive elements, or moving this logic to a repository method.