Question

I have a scope on my User model that gets users by country

scope :canada, where(:country => 'Canada')

If someone new signs up they’re showing up at the bottom of the list, but I want to put them at the top. I tried to do this, thinking Rails had some built-in way to change order

scope :canada, where(:country => 'Canada').order('DESC')

but I got this error message

SQLite3::SQLException: no such column: DESC: SELECT "users".* FROM "users"  WHERE "users"."country" = 'Canada' ORDER BY DESC

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You should specify an actual column name to sort on.

# records from Canada should be near the top of the list.
# that is, if you don't have countries that start with A or B. :)
scope :canada, where(:country => 'Canada').order('country ASC')

Or maybe you need just to sort on created_at

# newest records are on top
scope :canada, where(:country => 'Canada').order('created_at DESC')

Or, if you want canadian records to be on top, and other records in unspecified order, you can try this:

scope :canada, where(:country => 'Canada').order("case when country = 'Canada' then 0 else 1 end")