Order by "title" but then put "Other" at the end?

Rails
1

Is there any way in a scope to order a list by a text field (“title”,
for instance) but put the item that is titled “Other” at the end of
the list?

Thanks

2

Is there any way in a scope to order a list by a text field (“title”,
for instance) but put the item that is titled “Other” at the end of
the list?

Assuming that the item is always titled ‘Other’ and it will never be
something else and you’re okay with cheating a little bit this would
work for Rails 3…

scope :almost_by_title, order(“title = ‘Other’, title”)

This gets messy pretty fast. For instance when you have to add
‘Unknown’ and ‘Misc’ to the end as well. But if it’s all you need you
can get away with it :slight_smile:

As Marnen said, setup another “sortable_title” field and order on that.
The upside to doing this is you can also strip “A”, “The”, and “An” from
the beginning of titles so they sort more naturally.

-philip

3

Andy wrote in post #957534:

Is there any way in a scope to order a list by a text field (“title”,
for instance) but put the item that is titled “Other” at the end of
the list?

The easiest way would involve using a separate DB field, so that you can
do ORDER BY title, put_at_end.

Thanks

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

4

Philip H. wrote in post #957539:

Is there any way in a scope to order a list by a text field (“title”,
for instance) but put the item that is titled “Other” at the end of
the list?

Assuming that the item is always titled ‘Other’ and it will never be
something else and you’re okay with cheating a little bit this would
work for Rails 3…

scope :almost_by_title, order(“title = ‘Other’, title”)

Ooh, I like that.

This gets messy pretty fast. For instance when you have to add
‘Unknown’ and ‘Misc’ to the end as well. But if it’s all you need you
can get away with it :slight_smile:

As Marnen said, setup another “sortable_title” field and order on that.

That’s not what I said. I was thinking of a Boolean put_at_end field.

The upside to doing this is you can also strip “A”, “The”, and “An” from
the beginning of titles so they sort more naturally.

Excellent point.

-philip

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

5

On Oct 27, 9:09am, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

The easiest way would involve using a separate DB field, so that you can
do ORDER BY title, put_at_end.

Wouldn’t that have to be ORDER BY put_at_end, title? (assuming
put_at_end has a value of 0 or 1)

6

E. Litwin wrote in post #957563:

On Oct 27, 9:09am, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

The easiest way would involve using a separate DB field, so that you can
do ORDER BY title, put_at_end.

Wouldn’t that have to be ORDER BY put_at_end, title? (assuming
put_at_end has a value of 0 or 1)

Yes, it would. Must think a little more before I type. :smiley:

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

7

I solved this in an application by creating a separate “sort_name”
field that was strictly used for sorting. Never seen or used by the
user at all. We had a “before_save :build_sort_name” method that
handled all sorts of cases. Wouldn’t be too hard to add something
similar for your scenario.

def build_sort_name
sort_name = name.gsub(/^(The )(.*)/, ‘\2, \1’) # change “The Title”
to "Title, The "
sort_name = “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Other” if name = ‘Other’ # force ‘Other’
to sort after everything else
end