Order_query finds next / previous Active Record(s) in one query

Rails
1

order_query gives you next or previous records relative to the current
one efficiently.

For example, you have a list of items, sorted by priority. You have
10,000 items! If you are showing the user a single item, how do you
provide buttons for the user to see the previous item or the next item?

You could pass the item’s position to the item page and use OFFSET in
your SQL query. The downside of this, apart from having to pass a number
that may change, is that the database cannot jump to the offset; it has
to read every record until it reaches, say, the 9001st record. This is
slow. Here is where order_query comes in!

order_query uses the same ORDER BY query, but also includes a WHERE
clause that excludes records before (for next) or after (for prev) the
current one.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  include OrderQuery
  order_query :order_list, [
    [:pinned, [true, false]],
    [:published_at, :desc],
    [:id, :desc]
  ]
end

Now to use it:

# get the order object, scope default: Post.all
p = Post.find(31).order_list(scope) #=> OrderQuery::RelativeOrder<.>
p.before     #=> ActiveRecord::Relation<...>
p.previous   #=> Post<...>
p.position   #=> 5
p.next       #=> Post<...>
p.after      #=> ActiveRecord::Relation<...>

This works thanks to the generated WHERE clause that excludes all the
records
after / before the current one, such as:

-- post: pinned=true published_at='2014-03-21 15:01:35.064096' id=9
SELECT "posts".* FROM "posts"  WHERE
  ("posts"."pinned" = 'f' OR
   "posts"."pinned" = 't' AND (
      "posts"."published_at" < '2014-03-21 15:01:35.064096' OR
      "posts"."published_at" = '2014-03-21 15:01:35.064096' AND
        "posts"."id" < 9))
ORDER BY
  "posts"."pinned"='t' DESC, "posts"."pinned"='f' DESC,
  "posts"."published_at" DESC,
  "posts"."id" DESC
LIMIT 1

See more on Github: