Question

I’m having a little trouble figuring this out: I have a model Machine that has a foreign key on a locations table, and I want the default scope of Machine to sort by location.name. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes, use a join to your other table.

class Machine < ActiveRecord::Base

  default_scope joins(:location).order('locations.name')

end

Make sure the relation you call in joins matches the one defined in your Machine model.