sort Magento collection AFTER load

Question

The Magento collection sorting functions (e.g. Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Collection_Abstract::addAttributeToSort) work by adding an ORDER BY clause to

Answer 1

There is no proper way of doing it. But I think it is possible with using of Reflection. You can retrieve $_items property of collection object, sort them and set it back to the collection.

function sortCollection(Varien_Data_Collection $collection, callable $sorter) {
    $collectionReflection = new ReflectionObject($collection);
    $itemsPropertyReflection = $collectionReflection->getProperty('_items');
    $itemsPropertyReflection->setAccessible(true); // Make it accessible

    $collectionItems = $itemsPropertyReflection->getValue($collection);

    usort($collectionItems, $sorter);

    $itemsPropertyReflection->setValue($collection, $collectionItems);

    $itemsPropertyReflection->setAccessible(false); // Return restriction back

    return $collection;
}