Question

Let’s say I have two models: Course and ScheduledCourse.

The Course model has a name attribute.

course has_many :scheduled courses
scheduled_courses :belongs_to course

courses
id | name
 1 | biology
 2 | history
 3 | chemistry
 4 | literature

scheduled_courses
id | course_id 
 1 | 2
 2 | 4
 3 | 1
 4 | 2

How can I make an ActiveRecord query to sort the scheduled courses alphabetically?

Answer 1

Try…

ScheduledCourse.joins(:course).order('course.name')

If this doesn’t work, you may need to call .all before your joins condition, like so:

ScheduledCourse.all.joins(:course).order('course.name')

Like luacassus said, this answer can help; I think the syntax in that answer is pre-Arel (ActiveRecord 3), but it’ll get the job done. Hope that helps!

EDIT:

As mentioned by @FellowStranger, the correct syntax nowadays seems to be

ScheduledCourse.joins(:course).order('courses.name')