Rails Active Record find(:all, :order => ) issue

Could be two things. First,

This code is deprecated:

Model.find(:all, :order => ...)

should be:

Model.order(...).all

Find is no longer supported with the :all, :order, and many other options.

Second, you might have had a default_scope that was enforcing some ordering before you called find on Show.

Hours of digging around on the internet led me to a few useful articles that explain the issue:

• http://m.onkey.org/active-record-query-interface
• http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2010/07/the-way-to-rails-3/

I notice that in your first example, the simple :order => "date", record 7 is sorted before record 1. This order is also how you see the results in the multi-column sort, regardless of whether you sort by attending.

This would seem to make sense to me if the dates weren't exactly the same, and the date for 7 is before the date for 1. Instead of finding that the dates are exactly equal then proceeding to sort by attending, the query finds that the dates are not equal and simply sorts by that like all the other records.

I see from browsing around that SQLite doesn't have a native understanding of DATE or DATETIME data types and instead gives users the choice of floating point numbers or text that they must parse themselves. Is it possible that the literal representation of the dates in the database are not exactly equal? Most people seem to need to use date functions so that dates behave like you would expect. Perhaps there's a way to wrap your order by column with a date function that will give you something concrete to compare, like date(date) ASC, attending DESC. I'm not sure that syntax works, but it's an area to look at for solving your problem. Hope that helps.

The problem is that date is a reserved sqlite3 keyword. I had a similar problem with time, also a reserved keyword, which worked fine in PostgreSQL, but not in sqlite3. The solution is renaming the column.

See this: Sqlite3 activerecord :order => "time DESC" doesn't sort