CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlruby-on-railsruby
adam_0
adam_0

Reputation: 7200

How to sort and pick the first few items in Rails

This question is kind of an extension of Another question, so I'll be using that as a baseline for this question.

Say I have a bunch of tickets that I would like fetched and sorted by name. That's easy enough, just do:

@tickets = Ticket.find(:all, :order => 'name')

However, is there a way to tell Ticket.find that I only want the first x tickets? I'm betting there's a way to do this with straight SQL, and I'm sure I could just take @tickets and shorten it to the first x elements, but I'd rather do it a straight Ruby way that doesn't acquire all the tickets (I have an awful lot of "tickets" and I don't really want to get them all, that could cost a lot of CPU time).

All help is appreciated and thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 500

Answers (3)

Jesse
Jesse

Reputation: 21

This is just an extension of the 'limit' parameter in SQL. For example, SELECT * FROM ticket ORDER BY name LIMIT 4. It is, thus, available in any ORM, including ActiveRecord.

Upvotes: 1

Aditya Sanghi
Aditya Sanghi

Reputation: 13433

..and if you're using Rails 3, you could make it

@tickets = Ticket.order('name').limit(x).all

Upvotes: 1

zsalzbank
zsalzbank

Reputation: 9857

All you want to do is:

@tickets = Ticket.find(:all, :order => 'name', :limit => x)

Where x is how many records you want.

See the Rails documentation for more conditions you can put in your find. (Search for VALID_FIND_OPTIONS.)

Upvotes: 5

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