Laravel select columns and then group column value by date - php

Question

I'm trying to get what should seem like a simple SQL query to work in my Laravel project, I've got a front-end web application that allows a user to pull data from various pre-defined tables and a selectable list of columns.
This works fine if I don't attempt to select and groupBy together, equally, I need someway of grouping baed on whether the user wants to group data by a day, or a month for instance.
My POST request looks like, where each array item inside the parent array is a table:
[
[
table: 'my_table',
columns: ['event_category', 'event_action', 'event_count', 'created_at'] ...
filterBy: [
['event_category', 'my category'],
['event_action', 'some action']
],
orderBy: {
field: 'created_at',
direction: 'desc'
}
]
]
Each row in my_table contains an event_count column, which contains a number, so if there's 5 rows for a particular day with different event_count numbers, I need to add up all of those event_count entries and group them by that day
Here's my function and query:
public function findDataFromSources(Request $request)
{
$request_data = $request->all();
$realData = [
'size' => 0,
'results' => [],
'filtered' => []
];
foreach ($request_data as $key => $findable) {
// NOTE: this works for retrieving data that isn't grouped
// $res = DB::table($findable['table'])
// ->select($findable['columns'])
// ->where($findable['filterBy'])
// ->orderBy($findable['orderBy']['field'], $findable['orderBy']['direction'])
// ->take(20)
// ->get();
// TODO: this isn't grouping for some reason...
$res = DB::table($findable['table'])
->select($findable['columns'], DB::raw('sum(event_count) as total_events'))
->groupBy('created_at')
->orderBy($findable['orderBy']['field'], $findable['orderBy']['direction'])
->get();
$realData['size'] += count($res);
array_push($realData['results'], $res);
}
$data = [
'success' => true,
'message' => 'Your chosen data sources and fields',
'sources' => $realData
];
}
What am I missing? The error I'm getting is:
SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1055 Expression #1 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause and contains nonaggregated column

Answer 1

->select($findable['columns']
You cannot SELECT fields/columns that are not in GROUP BY without aggregate function and your $findable['columns'] probably contain fields that are not in GROUP BY.
You can use ANY_VALUE() like #RobbinBenard commented for example
->select(DB::raw('ANY_VALUE(' .$findable['columns'][0] .')'))
You can loop through the columns and use addSelect() to add those columns.
$query = DB::table($findable['table'])
->select(DB::raw('sum(event_count) as total_events'));
foreach($findable['columns'] as $column) {
$query->addSelect(DB::raw('ANY_VALUE(' .$column .')'));
}
$res = $query->groupBy('created_at')
->orderBy($findable['orderBy']['field'], $findable['orderBy']['direction'])
->get();