Pass a list or array of columns to orderBy

[elpete]

No description provided.

[timmaybrown]

Awesome project. I would like to try to tackle this issue if you wanted to provide some further direction on what you had in mind. My interpretation of the task is below.

Looking at the existing method signature it looks like the column argument is type of any. Would be pretty easy to pass a simple list or array to the method, iterate over the argument's value and append it to the variables.orders array.

Might be powerful if the column argument could also be allowed to pass an array-of-structs so each column that you are passing to have a different direction (asc vs desc) such as:

arOrderByCols = [ 
    { "col" = "last_name", "direction" = "asc" }, 
    { "col" = "age", "direction" = "desc" } 
];

or some sort of pipe delimited list:
colList = "last_name|asc,age|desc";

Let me know if I'm on the right track with what you were picturing.

I'm really trying to get my head around writing tests and this seemed like cool project to learn from and try to help out in the process.

[elpete]

Thanks, Tim! You are 100% on the right track! One of the things I've tried to do with qb is to have many ways to accomplish the same task. That way you never feel like the tool is saying "You're doing it wrong!" With that in mind, I'd like to cover three additional use cases:

builder.from( "users" ).orderBy( [
    "last_name",
    [ "age", "desc" ],
    { column = "favorite_color", direction = "desc" }
] ).orderBy( "stars" );

would compile to

SELECT * FROM "users" ORDER BY "last_name" ASC, "age" DESC, "favorite_color", DESC, "stars" ASC

So I'd like to accept:

• Just a column name. This would default to ascending.
• An array, containing the column name and direction.
• A struct with a column key and direction key.
• BONUS: Your pipe example was neat as well. 😄

A couple other criteria I can think of:

• If an array is passed as the first argument, just ignore the second argument direction.
• The order in the array passed in is the order added to the query.
• An subsequent orderBy calls should just append in order (like the above example).
• Any additional functionality should be documented in the doc blocks. (This is all the documentation that currently exists. 😞 )

Hopefully that doesn't scare you away! I think this is a great feature to work on TDD with, like you said. You can find the existing orderBy tests here. Most of the tests follow this general pattern:

1. Get a new builder getBuilder().
2. Call the methods you are testing.
3. Call toSQL() on the builder to get the generated SQL.
4. Compare that SQL to what it should be.
5. If bindings were added, compare they were added in the correct order, as well.

Feel free to push early and often and ask questions along the way. You don't need to finish with all of it before opening a pull request. Heck, GitHub says they open pull requests before they start coding sometimes!

Thanks again, and I'm excited to work with you!

[elpete]

Feature available in v2.1.0. Thanks again, @timmaybrown!