I think there is something changed in the union between Laravel 4 and Laravel 4.1. I have 2 models.
$pho
This i believe is a bug and is not fixed yet. I have the same issue when trying to sort union queries.
$query1->union($query2)->orderBy('foo','desc')
causes the order by clause to be added to $query 1 alone.
Adding orderBy individually to $query1 and $query2 and then doing a union like below
$query1->orderBy('foo desc');
$query2->orderBy('foo desc');
$query1->union($query2);
This obviously works but it does not produce the same result as doing a orderBy on the union's result.
For now, the workaround seem to be doing something like
$query = $query1->union($query2);
$querySql = $query->toSql();
$query = DB::table(DB::raw("($querySql order by foo desc) as a"))->mergeBindings($query);
This would produce a query like:
select * from (
(select a as foo from foo)
union
(select b as foo from bar)
) as a order by foo desc;
And that does the trick.