Symfony 5 / Doctrine: Sorting entity collection by creation DateTime - php

Question

I am developing a project using Symfony 5. One of my use-cases involves reading a collection from the Database, with the items sorted by creation order, descending (newest first). I am using the "Timestampable" extension from "stof/doctrine-extensions-bundle" to save the createdAt and updatedAt timestamps in my entity.
According to Doctrine documentation, I can sort items ussing the Repository methods:
$sortedEntities = $repository->findBy(array('createdAt' => 'DESC'));
This is the attribute in question:
/**
* #var \DateTime $createdAt
*
* #Gedmo\Timestampable(on="create")
* #ORM\Column(type="datetime")
*/
private $createdAt;
However, using 'ASC' or 'DESC' seems to have no impact on the ordering of the list.

Answer 1

You are not reading the documentation correctly. The orderBy is the second argument, not the first.
The example given in the docs is
$tenUsers = $em->getRepository('MyProject\Domain\User')->findBy(array('age' => 20), array('name' => 'ASC'), 10, 0);
Here, you can see the orderBy (name, ASC) is the second arg. The first arg is a where arg - in this case, WHERE age = 20.
Here is the full signature from Doctrine\Persistence\ObjectRepository
/**
* Finds objects by a set of criteria.
*
* Optionally sorting and limiting details can be passed. An implementation may throw
* an UnexpectedValueException if certain values of the sorting or limiting details are
* not supported.
*
* #param array<string, mixed> $criteria
* #param string[]|null $orderBy
* #param int|null $limit
* #param int|null $offset
* #psalm-param array<string, 'asc'|'desc'|'ASC'|'DESC'> $orderBy
*
* #return object[] The objects.
* #psalm-return T[]
*
* #throws UnexpectedValueException
*/
public function findBy(array $criteria, ?array $orderBy = null, $limit = null, $offset = null);
I hope that clarifies it for you. :-)
[EDIT] In response to your comment, you cannot use true as a value for the first argument. Look at the signature I posted. The first argument is #param array<string, mixed>, so it needs an array. Try this then:
sortedEntities = $repository->findBy(array(), array('createdAt' => 'DESC'));