ActiveRecord.find(array_of_ids), preserving order

Leonid Shevtsov picture Leonid Shevtsov · Nov 5, 2009 · Viewed 48.1k times · Source

When you do Something.find(array_of_ids) in Rails, the order of the resulting array does not depend on the order of array_of_ids.

Is there any way to do the find and preserve the order?

ATM I manually sort the records based on order of IDs, but that is kind of lame.

UPD: if it's possible to specify the order using the :order param and some kind of SQL clause, then how?

Answer

Gunchars picture Gunchars · Mar 22, 2013

Oddly, no one has suggested something like this:

index = Something.find(array_of_ids).group_by(&:id)
array_of_ids.map { |i| index[i].first }

As efficient as it gets besides letting SQL backend do it.

Edit: To improve on my own answer, you can also do it like this:

Something.find(array_of_ids).index_by(&:id).slice(*array_of_ids).values

#index_by and #slice are pretty handy additions in ActiveSupport for arrays and hashes respectively.