Order by / sort

[davetapley]

I'm a bit surprised there is no order by / sort functionality. Am I missing something?

For my use case I'm inserting documents with a {'_date': '2023-02-09T03:28:13.625084' field,
so I'd like to be able to sort on that and then .get( the most recent document matching the query.

[msiemens]

Hey @davetapley, you're not missing anything! TinyDB indeed does not have a sort/order by feature.

so I'd like to be able to sort on that and then .get( the most recent document matching the query.

Regarding get(), there are no guarantees about which document is returned if multiple documents match the query. Thus, using get() together with order by would no be guaranteed to work anyway, but I agree that it might be interesting to sort the results that search() returns.

However, I fear introducing sort/order by would lead to a lot of complexity, particularly around corner cases like sorting by a nested field, sorting by multiple fields etc. For this reason I'd probably be inclined to not implement order by/sorting at all and leaving this to the user by sorting the result of search() themselves.

Does this make sense to you?