Best way to implement sort asc or desc in rails

Question

Is there an elegant way to implement a sort asc and desc actions in the views/controller in rails?

What I have is the common index.html.erb view that lists all of my data of certain model and I want to add some small buttons (or make the title clickable) to sort the list ascending or descending of that column. I am wondering if there is an elegant and efficient way to do it or should I just add a new controller for every column (or button) I want this action to happen.

Answer 1

Here are two examples that I'm using. The first one with @plans is where I just want to order a decimal from lowest to highest. The other example is a bit more complicated where I want to order user files from newest to oldest. I then used a second variable to group the files by the date created. Both examples where performed in the controllers.

@plans = Plan.order("price")  @files= @user.files.order("id DESC").all @dates = @files.group_by { |t| t.created_at } 

For clickable buttons in your view, check out Ryan Bates's Railscast episode covering this information.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/228-sortable-table-columns

Answer 2

I recently used a gem called sorted with good results in case you want to use a pre-packaged solution for this instead of rolling out your own.

https://github.com/mynameisrufus/sorted