How to order messages by dates in Laravel - laravel-5

Question

Im building the chat section of my app with vueJs and laravel backend. I want to fetch my messages grouped by days. So when messages display, I want them to look something like this.
`Today
**All messages sent and received today, ordered by time**
Yesterday
**Yesterday's messages**
9/12/2018
**Messages for that day**
In my Chat model, I wrote an accessor for this like so;
public function getMessagesAttribute(){
return $this
->groupBy(function($q){
return $q->created_at->format('Y-m-d');
});
However, this does not give anything different from what I got when I use orderBy('created_at', 'ASC') in the controller. I will appreciate any assistance/guidance to achieve what I want please.

Answer 1

You could feed the results of your function into a loop that starts with the first date, sets the date as a variable, then compares it to the next date, which, if the next date has a smaller value, it gets preceded with a header field to result in grouping.
$date=null;
$next_date=null;
while($this) {
$date = $this->created_at;
if($next_date != null && $next_date<$date) {
*put your group title here*;
*put date/message here*;
} else {
*put date/message here*;
}
$next_date=$date;
}
Maybe build an array out of it, or something like that.

Answer 2

What about
$today = \Carbon\Carbon::now()->format('Y-m-d');
$yesterday = \Carbon\Carbon::yesterday()->format('Y-m-d');
$any_day = \Carbon\Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', '9/12/2018')->format('Y-m-d'); //used your example date
$messages_today = Message::where('created_at', 'like', "{$today}%")->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();
$messages_yesterday = Message::where('created_at', 'like', "{$yesterday}%")->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();
$messages_any_day = Message::where('created_at', 'like', "{$any_day}%")->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')->get();
It needs some tweeking according to your needs. But that should do the trick for you.