Scala + Ebean: orderBy not working?

Question

This is a simple situation but for some reason orderBy for me hasn't worked.

I have a very simple model class;

case class Sale(price: Int, name: String) {
  @Id
  var id: Long = 0
    @Formats.DateTime(pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")
    var saleDate: DateTime = new DateTime()
}

and the companion object;

object Sale {
    def find = new Finder[String, Sale](classOf[String], classOf[Sale])
}

Then I'm trying to fetch the list of all sale entries and order them using the saleDate value;

Sale.find
  .where
  ... // some conditions
  .orderBy("saleDate desc")
  .findMap

It seems pretty simple and straightforward to me, but it doesn't seem to work. Does anyone know what might the reason be?

Any chance you can put together a tiny project to test with? — Nate, Oct 20 '14 at 18:49
Try to use `orderBy().desc("saleDate")` instead and enable [SQL queries logging](http://stackoverflow.com/a/11956193/1205368) so you can see what actually gets executed. — Salem, Oct 20 '14 at 21:12
@Nate, Salem I've posted the answer. Thanks for looking into this, by the way. — Ashesh, Oct 21 '14 at 07:13

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 21 '14 at 07:12

The problem is a little strange and I've found a solution. Turns out, when you do .findMap, and the keys of the resulting map are the id's of the found entries, ebean/scala decides to arrange the keys in order (in my case, ascending), completely ignoring the intended order of the found elements. So to solve this, all I needed to do was to replace .findMap with .findList.

This does bring us to an interesting possibility – arranging responses without having to do an expensive orderBy; just fetch the entries into a map with the keys being the ordering parameter. I am currently using that approach and it works perfectly. It is efficient, in fact.

Scala + Ebean: orderBy not working?

1 Answers1