This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Sortable ActiveRecord Models Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Most of the time you should let your database order your ActiveRecord models, but every once in awhile you need to order an array of them using Ruby's sort method. Here's a neat little hack which might be useful to you if have a bunch of models with name attributes:

class ActiveRecord::Base
  
  def <=>(other)
    if respond_to?(:name) and other.respond_to?(:name)
      name <=> other.name
    else
      super
    end
  end
  
end

You can keep extensions like this one in a directory named /lib/core_ext of your Rails application. Remember to require it in your environment.rb file, and that like any Ruby script that is explicitly required, it won't reload dynamically when changed. (server restart needed)