SORT
The SORT
statement will force a sort of the array of already produced
intermediate results in the current block. SORT
allows specifying one or
multiple sort criteria and directions.
Syntax
The general syntax is:
SORT expression direction
Usage
Example query that is sorting by lastName (in ascending order), then firstName (in ascending order), then by id (in descending order):
FOR u IN users
SORT u.lastName, u.firstName, u.id DESC
RETURN u
Specifying the direction is optional. The default (implicit) direction for a
sort expression is the ascending order. To explicitly specify the sort direction,
the keywords ASC
(ascending) and DESC
can be used. Multiple sort criteria can be
separated using commas. In this case the direction is specified for each
expression separately. For example
SORT doc.lastName, doc.firstName
will first sort documents by lastName in ascending order and then by firstName in ascending order.
SORT doc.lastName DESC, doc.firstName
will first sort documents by lastName in descending order and then by firstName in ascending order.
SORT doc.lastName, doc.firstName DESC
will first sort documents by lastName in ascending order and then by firstName in descending order.
When iterating over collection-based arrays, the order of documents is always undefined unless an explicit sort order is defined using SORT
.
Constant SORT
expressions can be used to indicate that no particular
sort order is desired.
SORT null
Constant SORT
expressions will be optimized away by the AQL
optimizer during optimization, but specifying them explicitly may enable further
optimizations if the optimizer does not need to take into account any particular
sort order. This is especially the case after a COLLECT
statement, which is
supposed to produce a sorted result. Specifying an extra SORT null
after the
COLLECT
statement allows to AQL optimizer to remove the post-sorting of the
collect results altogether. Also see COLLECT
option method
.