Rails 7: New in_order_of Method in ActiveRecord
By Abhishek Kanojia on September 4, 2021
Rails 7 adds method in_order_of in QueryMethods, this allows you to specify an explicit order for the records.
Example usage of in_order_of
# Get ids of posts
Post.pluck(:id)
# => [1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
# Using explicit order of posts
Post.in_order_of(:id, [4, 1, 5]).pluck(:id)
# => [4, 1, 5, 6, 7, 8]
Notice how it returns the order of Posts in specified order, followed by all other posts.
If we provide some column data that does not exists in ordering, it will be ignored silently. In the following example, Post with id 999 does not exists in our system.
Post.in_order_of(:id, [4, 1, 5, 999]).pluck(:id)
# => [4, 1, 5, 6, 7, 8]