Laravel | Return rows in order based off pivot - laravel

Question

I have the following setup:
stages:
| id | name | order |
commands:
| id | name | body |
------------------------------=
| 1 | test | phpunit |
| 2 | style | echo "style" |
| 3 | deploy | deploy |
command_stage:
| command_id | stage_id | order |
---------------------------------
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 1 | 2 |
Basically, I would like to create a method on the stage model which allows me to get all of the commands back based off of the order, but commands have a specific order and so do the stages.
So each command is stored under a stage so we know which part to run but each command also has an order in that stage. Now I know I can do something like the following:
$inOrder = collect();
Stage::get()->each(function ($stage) {
$commands = $stage->commands()->orderByPivot('order')->get();
$inOrder->push($commands);
});
return $inOrder;
But I was wondering if there is a nicer way to do this? Or even a way to do this solely on one database hit?

Answer 1

Pre-load and sort the relationship:
$stages = Stage::with(['commands' => function ($subQuery) {
$subQuery->orderBy('command_stage', 'order');
}])->get();
foreach($stages as $stage) {
$inOrder->push($stage->commands);
}
This method of Eager-Loading will reduce the N+1 query issue of doing $stage->commands() inside the foreach() loop.