How can Laravel be utilized to sort products according to categories?

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Laravel has a built-in feature called Eloquent ORM which helps to interact with databases. To sort products according to categories in Laravel, we can follow these steps:

1. Create a database table for categories and products. The categories table should have a unique 'id' column and a 'title' column. The products table should have a 'category_id' column which is a foreign key referencing the categories table.

2. Create models for the categories and products tables using the artisan command:

   php artisan make:model Category

   php artisan make:model Product

3. Define the relationships between the category and product models. In the Category model, define a hasMany relationship with the Product model. In the Product model, define a belongsTo relationship with the Category model.

4. To sort the products according to categories, we can use the Eloquent query builder. Using the orderBy() method, we can sort the products by their category title as follows:

   $products = Product::orderBy('category.title')->get();

   This will return a collection of products sorted by their category titles.

5. To display the products grouped by categories, we can use the groupBy() method. Using this method, we can group the products by their category titles and then loop through each category to display the products. The code for this would look something like:

   $products = Product::orderBy('category.title')->get()->groupBy('category.title');
   
   foreach ($products as $category => $productsInCategory) {
      echo $category;
      foreach ($productsInCategory as $product) {
          echo $product->name;
      }
   }
   

   This will display the products grouped by their category titles.

6. We can also filter the products by category using the where() method. For example, to retrieve only the products belonging to a certain category, we can use the following code:

   $products = Product::where('category_id', $categoryId)->orderBy('name')->get();
   

   This will return a collection of products belonging to a specific category, sorted by their names.