Order a find using a has_many association

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm trying to order a find through a has_many association. I have a model called SalesOrder. Each sales order has things like amount, description, etc. I use the following to get the Sales Orders:

@sales_orders = SalesOrder.find(:all)

And I display them with:

<td><%= link_to sales_order.id.to_s, :action => 'show', :id => sales_order.id %></td> <td><%= sales_order.sold_to %></td> <td><%= sales_order.ship_to %></td> <td><%= (sales_order.rep.length < 1 ? "&nbsp;" : sales_order.rep) %></

<td><%= sales_order.description %></td> <td class="right_align"><%= sprintf("%#1.2f", sales_order.amount) %></

<td><%= sales_order.ship_date.strftime('%m/%d/%y') %></td> <td><%= sales_order.latest_history.nil? ? "&nbsp;" : sales_order.latest_history.route.name %></td>

The problem is that this list is not in the order that I need it to be. I can order it by any column in the sales_orders table, but I need to order it by latest_history.route.name I don't know how to order a query based on another table's column. Is this even possible? Or is there another way to accomplish the same result? My model definitions are below:

class SalesOrder < ActiveRecord::Base    has_many :histories    has_one :latest_history,             :class_name => "History",             :order => "id desc" end

class History < ActiveRecord::Base    belongs_to :route    belongs_to :sales_order end

class Route < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :histories   has_and_belongs_to_many :users

end

Thanks!

2

you might want to try this

@sales_orders = SalesOrder.find(:all, :include => [:histories, :routes], :order => “routes.name”)

-Dutch

3

Ok,

I added the following to my SalesOrder model:

has_many :routes, :through => :histories

Then I tried:

@sales_orders = SalesOrder.find(:all, :include => [:histories, :routes], :order => 'routes.name')

That partially worked. It seemed to group together all sales orders where the route wasn't blank. But they weren't all grouped together by the same status. Here's the order of the routes they were in:

Production Control Application Data Sheet Approval Manufacturing Engineering Released to Shop Manufacturing Engineering Manufacturing Engineering Manufacturing Engineering Manufacturing Engineering Project Engineering Released to Shop

Why weren't the Manufacturing Engineering and Released to Shop routes all together?

Thanks!

4

ah, I’m assuming you want to group sub items together, would you mind reponding back with you view code?