issues: 309471814

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association pull_request body repo type active_lock_reason performed_via_github_app reactions draft state_reason
309471814 MDU6SXNzdWUzMDk0NzE4MTQ= 189 Ability to sort (and paginate) by column 9599 closed 0 9599   31 2018-03-28T18:04:51Z 2018-04-15T18:54:22Z 2018-04-09T05:16:02Z OWNER  

As requested in https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/185#issuecomment-376614973

I've previously avoided this for performance reasons: sort-by-column on a column without an index is likely to perform badly for hundreds of thousands of rows.

That's not a good enough reason to avoid the feature entirely though. A few options:

  • Allow sort-by-column by default, give users the option to disable it for specific tables/columns
  • Disallow sort-by-column by default, give users option (probably in metadata.json) to enable it for specific tables/columns
  • Automatically detect if a column either has an index on it OR a table has less than X rows in it

We already have the mechanism in place to cut off SQL queries that take more than X seconds, so if someone DOES try to sort by a column that's too expensive it won't actually hurt anything - but it would be nice to not show people a "sort" option which is guaranteed to throw a timeout error.

The vast majority of datasette usage that I've seen so far is on smaller datasets where the performance penalties of sort-by-column are extremely unlikely to show up.

Still left to do:

  • [x] UI that shows which sort order is currently being applied (in HTML and in JSON)
  • [x] UI for applying a sort order (with rel=nofollow to avoid Google crawling it)
  • [x] Sort column names should be escaped correctly in generated SQL
  • [x] Validation that the selected sort order is a valid column
  • [x] Throw error if user attempts to apply _sort AND _sort_desc at the same time
  • [x] Ability to disable sorting (or sort only for specific columns) in metadata.json
  • [x] Fix "201 rows where sorted by sortable_with_nulls " bug
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