Sorting by joined data Yii2 - php

Question

In my Yii2 project I have post and post_views tables, and a Post model.
There are 2 fields in post_views:
post_id
views_counter
I'm using PostSearch and PostsQuery (ActiveQuery) for my queries.
My Task is: I need to get all my posts with custom field views where I get views_counter from post_views.
I'm not using hasMany in model because there is no model for post_views table in the project and I'd prefer not to create it if possible. Also, I need to sort my posts by views field. I'm stuck on this:
public function topPosts(){
$junction_table = '{{%post_views}}';
return $this->innerJoin($junction_table, Post::tableName().'.id='.$junction_table.'.post_id');
}
The main problem is that I don't know how to join and return data properly.
I need this query:
SELECT p.*, pv.views_count FROM posts p INNER JOIN post_views pv ON p.id = pv.post_id ORDER BY pv.views_count DESC;

Answer 1

First, you need to update your Post model with viewCount field:
class Post extends \yii\db\ActiveRecord
{
private $viewCount;
public static function tableName()
{
return "posts";
}
public function setViewCount($viewCount)
{
$this->viewCount = $viewCount;
}
public function getViewCount()
{
return $this->viewCount;
}
}
Then you need to include viewCount field in select list like this:
$post = new Post();
$query = $post->find()
->alias('p')
->select(['p.*', 'pv.views_count viewCount'])
->innerJoin("post_views pv", "p.Id = pv.id")
->limit(100)
->orderBy(["pv.views_count" => SORT_DESC]);
//Get SQL query string
echo $query->createCommand()->getSql();
//Execute query
$result = $query->all();