Ferret talk - Aug 2006 - How do empty strings affect sorting?

I''m creating a search that allows results to be sorted in different 
ways. In defining the sortable fields, I was careful to use untokenized 
indexes. Everything was working great except for one field-- it refused 
to sort properly, even though all the others were fine.

It seems as if the presence of empty strings in my data were to blame. 
By setting them to a default value, sorting on that field suddenly 
worked fine. Why is that? The same failure happened when I changed the 
empty strings to nulls.

Do I always have to check for empty strings or nulls when defining sort 
fields?

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On 8/12/06, Bill Lovett <bill at ilovett.com>
wrote:
> I''m creating a search that allows results to be sorted in
different
> ways. In defining the sortable fields, I was careful to use untokenized
> indexes. Everything was working great except for one field-- it refused
> to sort properly, even though all the others were fine.
>
> It seems as if the presence of empty strings in my data were to blame.
> By setting them to a default value, sorting on that field suddenly
> worked fine. Why is that? The same failure happened when I changed the
> empty strings to nulls.
>
> Do I always have to check for empty strings or nulls when defining sort
> fields?
Hi Bill,

This is a bug which has sort of been fixed in the latest version. I
say sort of because the solution is not really ideal. For integer or
float fields the default value is set to 0.  Ideally, I think
undefined values should come after defined values no matter what the
order but this is a little harder to do with the current
implementation. It works for string fields but not for integer and
float fields.

Cheers,
Dave