Sorting null values in descending order in Groq

Hi all, I have a problem with a sort.
I have a field called search_priority, which is 0, 5 or 10 - or it can be null or undefined.
I do

| order(search_priority desc)

and this doesn’t work as expected.If I eliminate the documents that doesn’t have search_priority set it works fine, but I would like all the documents, just ordered.
Is null interfering somehow? Shouldn’t it be 10, 5, 0, null – or is “null” considered a string, so it becomes null, 10, 5, 0 ?

Hi Rune. When sorting in descending order,

null

will appear first. To push the

null

values to the end of the sort, we can use

coalesce()

to assign a non-

null

value for the purposes of the sort. The key is to assign a value that will fit into the sort properly.
For numbers,
should treat

null

values as

-1

, putting them “lower” than search_priorities of

0

and higher. Feel free to change

-1

to a more negative number if there’s any chance that

search_priority

could be given a negative value in the future. The key is to ensure the

coalesce

fallback is always the lowest number.
Note that this does not change the

search_priority

values in any way. It is strictly in the context of the

order()

function.

Thanks, that worked! Probably a good idea to put that one in the Groq Cheat Sheet 🙂