Laravel Datatables Sorting Appended Fields - php

Question

My Model Items is related to Rooms, which is related to Buildings, which is related to Locations.
Short: Items belongsTo Rooms belongsTo Buildings belongsTo Locations
At the index function of the ItemController I want to show a table of Items. I use Laravel Datatables. It works for 'simple' tables, but I ran into the problem of sorting/searching custom/appended fields, because they are not in the table of course.
Basically I want to join the Room, Building and Location Name for each Item in the displaying table.
This is my Items Model:
protected $appends = [
'building_title',
'location_title',
'room_title',
];
public function getLocationTitleAttribute() {
return $this->room->building->location->title;
}
public function getBuildingTitleAttribute() {
return $this->room->building->title;
}
public function getRoomTitleAttribute() {
return $this->room->title;
}
This is my Controller:
public function anyData()
{
return Datatables::of(Item::query())->make(true);
}
What is the best approach to enable sorting/filtering for appended fields?
Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

This is my solution (no appended fields were used):
public function anyData()
{
$items = Item::join('rooms', 'items.room_id', '=', 'rooms.id')
->join('buildings', 'rooms.building_id', '=', 'buildings.id')
->join('locations', 'buildings.location_id', '=', 'locations.id')
->select([
'items.id',
'items.title',
'items.label_number',
'items.fibu_number',
'rooms.title as room_title',
'buildings.title as building_title',
'locations.title as location_title'
]);
return Datatables::of($items)->make(true);
}