Working With Rails

Default Order

Author : Antonin AMAND Email : aamand@gwikzone.org

The default_order plugin provides a ‘order_by’ method to be called in your models.

ex :

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base order_by “first_name, last_name”

end

the order_by method will append the given argument to :order Hash key of ActiveRecord::Base.find method IF IT HAS NOT BEEN PROVIDED.

ex :

Contact.find(:all, :conditions => “last_name LIKE ‘toto’”)

1. will act as if you had written this Contact.find(:all, :order => “last_name, first_name”, :conditions => “last_name LIKE ‘toto’”)
2. but if you provide :order it will override the default order

If you use those attributes in other models, you may want to specify the table_name :

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base order_by “contacts.first_name, contacts.last_name”

end

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly