Sorting a List of Employee Records by Custom Logic in Ruby on Rails - Handling Duplicates and Nil Values
I'm not sure how to approach I'm having a hard time understanding I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer... I’m trying to sort a list of employee records in my Ruby on Rails application based on their `hire_date` and `last_name`, but I’m running into issues when dealing with records that have duplicate `hire_date` values and some records that have `nil` for `last_name`. The goal is to first sort by `hire_date` in ascending order, and for employees hired on the same date, I want to sort them alphabetically by their `last_name`. However, I want the records with `nil` `last_name` to appear at the end of the list. Here’s the code I’m currently using: ```ruby Employee.all.order(:hire_date, Arel.sql('last_name IS NULL, last_name')) ``` This works fine for the most part, but I’m working with an unexpected behavior where the records with `nil` for `last_name` are being placed in the middle when they should be at the end. Additionally, I’m concerned about performance since the dataset can grow quite large. I’ve also tried using: ```ruby Employee.all.sort_by { |e| [e.hire_date, e.last_name || 'zzz'] } ``` However, this seems slower especially when fetching a substantial number of records. Is there a more efficient way to achieve this or a different approach I should consider? Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. I've been using Ruby for about a year now. What's the correct way to implement this? This issue appeared after updating to Ruby stable. Any pointers in the right direction?