ggplot bar plot with facet-dependent order of categories

Question

I've seen many questions (often linked to Order Bars in ggplot2 bar graph) about how to (re)order categories in a bar plot.

What I am after is just a touch different, but I haven't found a good way to do it: I have a multi-faceted bar plot, and I want to order the x axis for each facet independently, according to another variable (in my case, that variable is just the y value itself, i.e. I just want the bars to go in increasing length in each facet).

Simple example, following e.g. Order Bars in ggplot2 bar graph:

df <- data.frame(name=c('foo','bar','foo','bar'),period=c('old','old','recent','recent'),val=c(1.23,2.17,4.15,3.65))
p = ggplot(data = df, aes(x = reorder(name, val), y = val))
p = p + geom_bar(stat='identity')
p = p + facet_grid(~period)
p

What we get is the following:

Whereas what I want is:

Answer 1

Ok, so all philosophizing aside, and in case anyone is interested, here is an ugly hack to do it. The idea is to use different labels (think paste(period, name) except I replace the period into 0-space, 1-space, etc. so that they don't show). I need this plot and I don't want to arrange grobs and the like, because I might want to share a common legend, etc.

The atomic example given earlier becomes:

df <- data.frame(name=c('foo','bar','foo','bar'),
  period=c('old','old','recent','recent'),
  val=c(1.23,2.17,4.15,3.65),
  stringsAsFactors=F)
df$n = as.numeric(factor(df$period))
df = ddply(df,.(period,name),transform, x=paste(c(rep(' ',n-1), name), collapse=''))
df$x = factor(df$x, levels=df[order(df$val), 'x'])
p = ggplot(data = df, aes(x = x, y = val))
p = p + geom_bar(stat='identity')
p = p + facet_grid(~period, scale='free_x')
p

Another example, still a bit silly but closer to my actual use case, would be:

df <- ddply(mpg, .(year, manufacturer), summarize, mixmpg = mean(cty+hwy))
df$manufacturer = as.character(df$manufacturer)
df$n = as.numeric(factor(df$year))
df = ddply(df, .(year,manufacturer), transform,
     x=paste(c(rep(' ',n-1), manufacturer), collapse=''))
df$x = factor(df$x, levels=df[order(df$mixmpg), 'x'])
p = ggplot(data = df, aes(x = x, y = mixmpg))
p = p + geom_bar(stat='identity')
p = p + facet_grid(~year, scale='free_x')
p = p + theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle=90,hjust=1,vjust=.5,colour='gray50'))
p

Close your eyes, think of the Empire, and try to enjoy.