Order by number of occurances in a has_many relationship

Rails
1

I can’t seem to find anything to explain how I might be able to order a
list according to the number of occurrences of an item in a has_many
relationship, so maybe someone could help me learn how…

To illustrate, imagine I have the following situation:

I have one table with details for a number of people, and one table of
items. Each item belongs to one person and each person can have may
items.

In my view I have something like this:

<% for person in @people %>

<%=h person.name %> <%=h person.items.count %> <% end %>

I can get the list to order by the id/name etc. of the people, but I
really want to order it by the number of items belonging to each person,
something like so:

@people = Person.find(:all, :order => ‘person.items.count desc’)

except that this brings up an ‘unknown column’ error.

Any ideas for getting around this?

2

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Sandy T.
[email protected] wrote:

@people = Person.find(:all, :order => ‘person.items.count desc’)

except that this brings up an ‘unknown column’ error.

Any ideas for getting around this?

@people.sort!{ |a,b| a.items.count <=> b.items.count }

–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

3

Greg D. wrote:

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Sandy T.
[email protected] wrote:

@people = Person.find(:all, :order => ‘person.items.count desc’)

except that this brings up an ‘unknown column’ error.

Any ideas for getting around this?

@people.sort!{ |a,b| a.items.count <=> b.items.count }

–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

Cheers for that Greg, it works fine but is a little heavy on the
database (predictable I guess). However, this has steered me towards
creating a counter cache in the people table, which I hadn’t considered
before and which cuts down hugely on the number of SQL queries.

Thanks!