Question

I am using ThinkingSphinx in an application and right now I am not doing any type of order on my results. However, I would like to make this an option via a link someone can click on the page and it just passes it through the URL to ‘refresh’ the page with the results now ordered.

In the .search parameters I tried doing :order => params[:o] then in the URL passing o=columnname but that does not seem to work.

Just to note, when I hard-code the ordering it works fine, I’m not having trouble with indexing/making a DB column sortable. I would just like to make it so via a URL argument it the results can be displayed ordered.

Answer 1

According to the Sphinx documentation, the fields you want to use for sorting must be flagged as sortable. Attributes defined with has do not have to be flagged, because all attributes are sortable:

class Article
  ..
  define_index do
    indexes title, :sortable => true
    indexes author(:name), :as => :author, :sortable => true
    ..
  end

Then one can use the :order and :sort_mode parameter to define the sort order:

sort_order = params[:o]
Article.search "pancakes", :order => sort_order, :sort_mode => :desc