Sorting ActiveAdmin Index Pages

Here’s how I got my list of Philosoraptors sorted in a Ruby on Rails ActiveAdmin app:

ActiveAdmin.register Philosoraptor do
  controller do
    def index
      params[:order] = "name_asc"
      super
    end
  end 
end

Because each Resource in ActiveAdmin (meaning table in the database, or rails model) has a controller, you can modify the controller. What I did above was just add to the params array a key called order with a value of name_asc - meaning I wanted my philosoraptors to be sorted in order to by name, ascending (from a to z).

You can find out these order key values by looking at the end of the URL in your browser, in Active Admin. The query string will be everything after the ? in the URL, after clicking on one of the column names in the top row of the table.

In my code example above, I put in the order parameter, then I called super on the method to inherit the rest of the controller code from ActiveAdmin.

Hopefully you find that this works for you. It’s a pretty easy way of setting up a default sort in ActiveAdmin. Let me know if you have any comments or troubles getting it working in your app.