Keep Our Drop Down & Index List Sorted For Better User Experience

Generally when we fetch records from our DB and render those in our view without caring about sorting those records.

Let’s consider a case, we have doctors name in a dropdown and patient needs to chose one doctor whose name is “James Brito”.  If we have 1000 doctor names then it’ll be quite tough for our patient to find his/her favorite doctor in the list.

For better user experience those records should be sorted in view level.

Let’s take this sample case :

class Doctor < ActiveRecord::Base  
       belongs_to :deparment
end
class  Department < ActiveRecord::Base
           has_many :doctors
end

Keep the values sorted in Drop down list :
Now represent those to End User (keeping doctor names in a dropdown ) performing sorting on name Column (as our patient can search James Brito Alphabetically) sorting values in View Page :

    
             Select your Doctor: 
      

Keep the values sorted in index View:

Let’s say We want to Doctor names should be alphabetically sorted in index page : We need to sort it at the controller level ; then render the same in View.

Sorting the values in controller Section  :

def index
          @doctors = Department.find(:all, :order => 'name')
      end
in doctors/ index.html.erb: 
  
       
   

Now our patient can easily find any doctor in the dropdown as well as in the doctors list.