Question

I have a priority field with four options: “Urgent”, “High”, “Normal”, and “Low”.

I have this field displayed in a table of records, and I am using will_paginate’s ordering as follows:

@projects = @company.projects.paginate :page => params[:page], :order => (sort_column + " " + sort_direction)

private
def sort_column
  ['priority', 'name'].include?(params[:sort]) ? params[:sort] : "priority"
end

A typical ordering as above will give me:

1. High
2. Low
3. Normal
4. Urgent

This order is wrong. How can I get this column to order specifically to Urgent, High, Normal, Low?

Answer 1

Not sure if Rails has an easier way to do this, but the way I typically see it done is to have a separate table holding your priorities along with an order field that’s just an integer. Then you just join to that table and order by the integer field.