Server Side Sorting in Ruby

Recently a friend asked me this question about server-side sorting in Rails. Here’s the question and my answer.

The question:

I’m working on an app that displays movies. The index page simply lists all movies in a table %table#movies in HAML. There is a clickable ‘Movie Title’ header above the list of movies and when clicked, the page should reload but in alphabetical order. Therefore I assume I need to use .order(:title) somewhere in the app. I was able to simply order all movies when the page loads by doing the following in movies_controller.rb:

def index
  @movies = Movie.all.order(:title)
end

But I need it to execute when the following is clicked from the index.html.haml page.

%th= link_to('Movie Title', '/')

How can I do this?

Here’s my answer.

Send a Parameter

# app/views/movies/index.html.haml

%h1= link_to 'Movie Title', root_path(sort: true)

This utilizes two Rails conventions, a named path (root_path is synonymous with '/'), and a query string parameter.

When the link is clicked, a parameter will be appended to the URL (http://yoursite.com/?sort=true). That parameter will be available in the controller action, and we’ll use it to sort the movies. As a side note, this detail can be used to quickly iterate on changes, as you can type your parameters directly into the browser address bar.

Sort Based on Parameter

Here’s the controller code:

# app/controllers/movies_controller.rb

def index
  @movies = Movies.all

  if params[:sort]
    @movies = @movies.order(:title)
  end
end

This will always define @movies as all movies, unless the query parameter sort is true. When true, it will redefine @movies as itself, but ordered by title.

This is server-side sorting, and it has many uses. The parameter could be true, or it could be set to title, lead_actor, director, etc., further refining our search results.

Finally, while this solution is illustrative for homework, it’s not yet production grade, because it introduces a security vulnerability. Right now we are accepting any value for sort, which exposes us to evil code injection. Rails solved this with something called strong parameters, an important topic beyond the scope of the problem.

• Ruby