wordpress WP Query order by views count - php

Question

hello I wanted to order articles post type by views count in wordpress. so I added a custom field to article post type which the name is view and it is a number field. I added it with PODS. I wrote this code in header.php so it it will incremenet automatically by each view:
<?php
if( get_post_type() == 'article' ) {
$postview = intval(get_post_field('views'));
if($postview > 0){
$postview = $postview+1;
}else{
$postview = 1;
}
$postID = $post->ID;
update_post_meta($postID,'views',$postview);
}
?>
it worked. but when I wanted to add a advanced query by elementor it does not work as expected. I added this to functions.php:
add_action( 'elementor/query/popular_articles', function( $query ) {
$query->set('post_type', 'article');
$query->set('meta_key', 'views');
$query->set('orderby', 'meta_value_num');
$query->set('order', 'DESC');
} );
I also tried this:
add_action( 'elementor/query/popular_articles', function( $query ) {
$query->set('orderby', 'views');
} );
none of those work as expected in elementor posts widget and the result is not sorted. when I set the popular_article query. the thing that I want to achieve with Wordpress WP_Query is something like this SQL query:
select post_title ,wp_z9gsc7_postmeta.meta_key,wp_z9gsc7_postmeta.meta_value from wp_z9gsc7_posts INNER JOIN wp_z9gsc7_postmeta ON wp_z9gsc7_posts.ID = wp_z9gsc7_postmeta.post_id where wp_z9gsc7_postmeta.meta_key = 'views' ORDER BY wp_z9gsc7_postmeta.meta_value DESC
thank you for your response in advance

Answer 1

this worked:
add_action( 'elementor/query/popular_articles', function( $query ) {
$query->set('post_type', 'article');
$query->set('meta_key', 'views');
$query->set('orderby', 'meta_value_num');
$query->set('order', 'DESC');
$query->set('offset', 0);
} );