Rails association sort with case agnostic

Question

I have a have_many association that I would like to sort so that the case is agnostic. Currently it looks like this:

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base

  has_many :studies, order: :name

which sorts capital letters first then lower case giving results like

 DP
 De

I'd like the sorting to be case agnostic i.e.

 De
 DP

I've been able to do this in the model method, e.g.,

 def studies
   account.studies.sort_by! { |s| s.name.downcase }
 end

Is it possible to sort in the has_many association using order: so that the result is case agnostic?

Answer 1

This should work if you'r using mysql

has_many :studies, order: 'lower(name)'

lower is a mysql function that is equivalent to downcase in ruby. So since in Rails you can customize the order clause using SQL fragments you essentially can use any database vendor specific functionality that you want.