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Sorting WP Posts Alphabetically with Typesense

TLDR Adam wanted to sort WP posts alphabetically by last name. Jason suggested using sort_by parameter with Typesense, which worked successfully.

6mo

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Jun 08, 2023 (6 months ago)

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Adam

03:27 PM

so I have what may be a very higher-ed focused question - I want to use typesense to search WP posts with custom meta fields. each post represents a person (e.g. a faculty member). currently, when indexing the posts, they have a default_sorting_field of the post’s date converted to int32 by strtotime. however, I know the question will come up in a department meeting - is there any way to convert the “last name” field (which is obviously a string) into an integer which would allow me to list the results alphabetically when they’re initially fetched? so - does anyone know how to create an integer out of a string which would allow the documents to be ordered from the outset as if they were in alphabetical rather than date order? I fully admit that this is an odd question

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Jason

04:47 PM

(This actually used to be a common question before we added the ability to sort by strings in Typesense natively!)

Instead of using the default_sorting_field you can set a default sort_by field as a search parameter to use the name field like this:

sort_by: text_match:desc,last_name:desc

Adam

05:24 PM

oooh ok I can try that. will that work on the initial load as well? my colleague and I were chatting and thinking about encoding each letter as a number 00 - 25. then those would represent the alphabetical order of the string

Jason

05:25 PM

I’m not sure how the wordpress plugin does it (if you’re using it), but from Typesense’s perspective, you can set a sort_by parameter on the very first request which populates records on page load

Adam

05:27 PM

perfect. I’m writing my own plugin for this project. to handle our particular context

05:38

Adam

05:38 PM

just checked it out with postman and that worked perfectly! even handled nested object syntax without a problem

06:10

Adam

06:10 PM

and confirmed it works in my plugin. got it working on the first try. really brilliant stuff here

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