Question

I’m populating a dropdown through the use of ng-options which is hooked to a controller that in turn is calling a service. Unfortunately the data coming in is a mess and I need to be able to sort it alphabetically.

You figure that something like $.sortBy would do it but unfortunately it didn’t do jack. I know I can sort it via javascript with a helper method function asc(a,b) or something like that but I refuse to believe that there is not cleaner way of doing this plus I don’t want to bloat the controller with helper methods. It is something so basic in principle so I don’t understand why AngularJS doesn’t have this.

Is there a way of doing something like $orderBy('asc')?

Example:

<select ng-option="items in item.$orderBy('asc')"></select>

It would be extremely useful to have options in orderBy so you can do whatever you want, whenever you usually try to sort data.

Answer 1

Angular has an orderBy filter that can be used like this:

<select ng-model="selected" ng-options="f.name for f in friends | orderBy:'name'"></select>

See this fiddle for an example.

It’s worth noting that if track by is being used it needs to appear after the orderBy filter, like this:

<select ng-model="selected" ng-options="f.name for f in friends | orderBy:'name' track by f.id"></select>