order-by-sort

Takes an array of objects and sorts them by an arbitrary number of common string, number or Date fields with control over direction and placement of null elements. Apart from the given fields it retains original order (stable sort). The original array will not be modified.

Particularly useful for emulating behaviour of postgres sorting and accepts PostgreSQL compliant ORDER BY options ('asc', 'asc_nulls_first', 'asc_nulls_last', 'desc', 'desc_nulls_first', 'desc_nulls_last'). Which eg. is something you could want if you want to supply correct ordering after mutations in optimistic UI updates on the client before a server responds. Order by options are also 1:1 the one's Hasura uses in their GraphQL schemas.

• zero dependencies
• fully typed in typescript
• 100% code test coverage (100% Statements 43/43, 100% Branches 54/54, 100% Functions 8/8, 100% Lines 43/43)
• small footprint (1.2kb minified)
• leverages vanilla arr.sort to benefit from improving browser implementations
• written in an actually readable way

Installation

npm i order-by-sort or yarn add order-by-sort

Usage

const entityArray = [
  { id: 5, rating: null, author: 'Wilma', date: '2021-01-02' },
  { id: 7, rating: null, author: null, date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 1, rating: 1, author: 'Paul', date: '2021-01-03' },
  { id: 2, rating: 3, author: 'Anne', date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 4, rating: 3, author: 'Paul', date: '2021-01-03' },
  { id: 3, rating: null, author: 'Frank', date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 6, rating: null, author: null, date: '2021-01-01' },
]
const orderByArray = [
  { field: 'rating', value: 'desc_nulls_first' },
  { field: 'date', value: 'asc' }
]
const sortedArray = orderBySort(entityArray, orderByArray)
/*
sortedArray is now [
  { id: 7, rating: null, author: null, date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 3, rating: null, author: 'Frank', date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 6, rating: null, author: null, date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 5, rating: null, author: 'Wilma', date: '2021-01-02' },
  { id: 2, rating: 3, author: 'Anne', date: '2021-01-01' },
  { id: 4, rating: 3, author: 'Paul', date: '2021-01-03' },
  { id: 1, rating: 1, author: 'Paul', date: '2021-01-03' }
]
*/

entityArray OrderBySortItem[] — Array of Objects with common string, number or Date fields to sort by. orderByArray OrderByEntry[] — Array of objects with ordering definitions in pairs of field/value where value is a valid OrderBySortOrderOperator

See src/index.test.js for more examples and src/index.ts for types.

In terms of performance the above example runs at 308 572 ops/s, ±0.28%, but as a disclaimer: Performance is not yet tested for ridiculously large datasets. But feel free to do so and let me know.