Rails - May 2006 - Ordering one model class by details contained in another

I''m very new to rails.  I have on "main" model class
"Competition" with
a supporting model class "CompDates" arranged in a 1:m relationship. 
In
my "list" action, I would like to order the competitions by earliest 
date.

In other languages, I probably would have simply created a view in the 
database.  If I''m trying to limit myself to migration supported
database
usage though, that gets a little "dangerous" as the only way it
appears
to make a view within the migration is using execute, which loses the 
database agnostic nature to some degree.

I suspect I could easily sort them returned competitions in memory, but 
that would break the pagination support that the scaffold provided  and 
I don''t currently see a why to make a post-retrieval sort play nice
with
any pagination scheme I could think of.

I tried a rather messy :conditions clausee on the data source for the 
paginaite, but as it had to use a MIN(event_date) type construct it fell 
apart unless I switched to a find_by_sql style call which felt 
inelegant.

I''m currently playing with making the aggregation :act_as_list, while 
adding an ordinal to control the ordering of naturally sortable dates 
feels a little odd, at least I could right the :condition without 
needing to use an aggregate.

Are there other approaches I should consider?

Thanks
Eric

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