Custom Sort - Possible?

Hi all,

I’m working on a help system that lets users assign a “tag color” to
their requests in addition to assigning the usual “high, medium, low”
priority. My question is whether it’s possible to do a sort based on
the tag color. Valid colors are green, yellow, orange, and red, and
these are stored as strings in the database.

I’d like to use something like:

Customer Model

has_many :requests, :order => priority, tag_color

Is it possible to add a sort based on these string values?

Thanks!

I’m working on a help system that lets users assign a “tag color” to
their requests in addition to assigning the usual “high, medium, low”
priority. My question is whether it’s possible to do a sort based on
the tag color. Valid colors are green, yellow, orange, and red, and
these are stored as strings in the database.

I’d like to use something like:

Customer Model

has_many :requests, :order => priority, tag_color

That will sort them alphabetically, probably not what you want.

If there is an order those colors you could do something like this:

:order => “priority, tag_color = ‘red’, tag_color = ‘orange’,
tag_color = ‘yellow’, tag_color = ‘green’”

With an optional “DESC” thrown in to each of those. Basically that
converts your order by clause into a series of booleans and sorts that
way. Little ugly, but it will work.

-philip

You could also put a method like this in your Request model

def Request.sql_tag_color_order
‘(CASE requests.tag_color WHEN ‘red’ THEN 1 WHEN ‘yellow’ THEN 2
WHEN ‘green’ THEN 3 ELSE 4 END)’
end

Then change the line in your Customer model to
has_many :requests, :order => “priority,
#{Request.sql_tag_color_order}”

That way when you want to order requests in another part of your
application you can use Request.sql_tag_color_order instead of having
to repeat the transformation from text to something order.

HTH