Class: Ferret::Search::SortField

Inherits:
Object
  • Object
show all
Defined in:
ext/r_search.c

Overview

Summary

A SortField is used to sort the result-set of a search be the contents of a field. The following types of sort_field are available;

  • :auto

  • :integer

  • :float

  • :string

  • :byte

  • :doc_id

  • :score

The type of the SortField is set by passing it as a parameter to the constructor. The :auto type specifies that the SortField should detect the sort type by looking at the data in the field. This is the default :type value although it is recommended that you explicitly specify the fields type.

Example

title_sf = SortField.new(:title, :type => :string)
rating_sf = SortField.new(:rating, :type => float, :reverse => true)

Note 1: Care should be taken when using the :auto sort-type since numbers will occur before other strings in the index so if you are sorting a field with both numbers and strings (like a title field which might have “24” and “Prison Break”) then the sort_field will think it is sorting integers when it really should be sorting strings.

Note 2: When sorting by integer, integers are only 4 bytes so anything larger will cause strange sorting behaviour.