# ActiveRecord.find(\[id array\]) question

**URL:** <https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/activerecord-find-id-array-question/16290>\
**Category:** rubyonrails-talk\
**Created:** [July 27, 2007, 11:04pm UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/activerecord-find-id-array-question/16290 "2007-07-27T23:04:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Lionel\_Bouton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e4f/32.png) [@Lionel\_Bouton](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/u/Lionel_Bouton)\
**Post date:** [July 27, 2007, 11:04pm UTC](https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/activerecord-find-id-array-question/16290/1 "2007-07-27T23:04:54Z")

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Ryan Mohr wrote:

> If you have a collection of ids, what's the best way to extract the records from the database while maintaining the original id order?
> 
> Recently I noticed that a find statement like
> 
> % User.find([1, 2, 3])
> 
> will return the same thing as
> 
> % User.find([3, 2, 1])
> 
> ...ignoring the order of the ids in the array completely. In my case, I have an array that is twenty ids long and I need the ordering preserved. What's the best solution without having to loop through the ids and select each record one by one? &nbsp;&nbsp; It's a SQL limitation, you can't enforce any order unless you actually use ORDER BY (:order parameter of ActiveRecord::Base.find).

You could create a hash 'id =\> position' from your original id array and use it to sort the results according to their id.

Lionel