Ruby: Sorting by boolean fields
We were doing a bit of work on RapidFTR in the ThoughtWorks Pune office today and one problem my pair and I were trying to solve was how to sort a collection of objects by a boolean field.
Therefore given the following array of values:
form_sections = [FormSection.new(:enabled => false, :name => "a", :order => 1),
FormSection.new(:enabled => true, :name => "b", :order => 2)]We wanted to display those form sections which were disabled at the bottom of the page.
We originally tried the following:
form_sections.sort_by { |row| [row.enabled, row.order] }But got the following error:
undefined method `<=>' for true:TrueClassWe figured we’d need to convert the true and false values to equivalent values which is demonstrated on this Stack Overflow post:
form_sections.sort_by { |row| [row.enabled ? 0 : 1, row.order] }I didn’t realise it would be that simple to do - it’s pretty neat.
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.