Question

Most questions about advanced ordering involve a few prioritized fields, but here’s a different problem.

I have a series of projects ordered by title, and these projects are assigned to individuals in the company. I want to be able to have each individual’s projects float to the top for that individual.

This is not a request to order by assigned_individual then job_title (because this would mess up the ordering of all projects that aren’t mine). This is a request to have records still ordered principally by job_title but to have an override such that records with, let’s say, assigned_individual_id = 3 are shown first.

Answer 1

Not hard, you just have to slip a CASE into your ORDER BY to manually push the rows of interest to the top, something like this:

id = M.send(:sanitize_sql, ['?', id])
M.order("case when assigned_individual = #{id} then 0 else 1 end, job_title")

where, of course, id is the user that you want on top. If this is done inside one of M’s methods then you won’t need to use send to get around the protectedness of sanitize_sql.

This technique can easily be extended to push multiple users to the top if that’s needed.