You probably already know that CakePHP's Set class is one of the most useful additions to CakePHP 1.2. What may have slipped through the cracks is that you can now sort arrays very easily using a new method - Set::sort().
Sorting data returned from a database query
You're probably thinking "Err... idiot... just use the ORDER BY functionality in the model!". Yeah, we could do that, but that's not much fun!
Here is my freshly baked People controller, which gracefully passes some data to my view. Nothing special here.
The $people array is in the standard format we receive from our model, and has a belongsTo association (Occupation).
Person.birth_date DESC
Set::sort() currently takes 3 arguments - the array to sort, the array value to sort on, and the sort order. As with the other Set methods, we specify the value to sort on using a key path. This makes it super easy to deal with complex arrays.
Set::sort() is pretty cool, however it is missing a few features I would have liked (such as multisort and a default sort order), however by the time this method makes it into the CakePHP trunk, these features might already be available.
