Question

I can’t seem to pull ordered data from the database. I’m trying to list users on my homepage based on how many views their profile has.

My users schema looks like this:

# == Schema Information
#
#
# Table name: users
#
#  id              :integer          not null, primary key
#  email           :string(255)
#  created_at      :datetime         not null
#  updated_at      :datetime         not null
#  username        :string(255)
#  password_digest :string(255)
#  views           :integer
#

My controller:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  def home
    @users = User.order("'views' DESC")
  end
end

The problem is that .order does nothing at all. @users is still ordered by id, as if I had done User.all. I tried running User.order("'views' DESC") in the Rails console, but I get the same thing as User.all.

I checked the development.log and the query seems to have been executed correctly:

[1m[35mUser Load (0.2ms)[0m  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" ORDER BY 'views' DESC
Rendered pages/home.html.erb within layouts/application (1.1ms)
Rendered layouts/_header.html.erb (0.5ms)
Rendered layouts/_footer.html.erb (0.0ms)

Doing the sorting client-sided works, however I want to paginate the users so this is not an option. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

@users = User.order("views DESC")

Check http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#ordering

For pagination you could get some help with this gem:
https://github.com/mislav/will_paginate