Rails Active Record find(:all, :order => ) issue

Question

I seem to be unable to use the ActiveRecord::Base.find option :order for more than one column at a time.

For example, I have a "Show" model with date and attending columns.

If I run the following code:

@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date")

I get the following results:

[#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]

If I run the following code:

@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "attending DESC")

[#<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>,
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>,
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>,
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>]

But, if I run:

@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending DESC")

OR

@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending ASC")

OR

@shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date ASC, attending DESC")

I get the same results as only sorting by date:

 [#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]

Where as, I want to get these results:

[#<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>,
#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, 
 #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, 
 #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>,
 #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>]

This is the query being generated from the logs:

[4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m   [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) LIMIT 1[0m
[4;36;1mShow Load (3.0ms)[0m   [0;1mSELECT * FROM "shows" ORDER BY date ASC, attending DESC[0m
[4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m   [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) [0m

Finally, here is my model:

  create_table "shows", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "headliner"
    t.string   "openers"
    t.string   "venue"
    t.date     "date"
    t.text     "description"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.decimal  "price"
    t.time     "showtime"
    t.integer  "attending",   :default => 0
    t.string   "time"
  end

What am I missing? What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE: Thanks for all your help, but it seems that all of you were stumped as much as I was. What solved the problem was actually switching databases. I switched from the default sqlite3 to mysql.

Answer 1

Could be two things. First,

This code is deprecated:

Model.find(:all, :order => ...)

should be:

Model.order(...).all

Find is no longer supported with the :all, :order, and many other options.

Second, you might have had a default_scope that was enforcing some ordering before you called find on Show.

Hours of digging around on the internet led me to a few useful articles that explain the issue:

• http://m.onkey.org/active-record-query-interface
• http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2010/07/the-way-to-rails-3/