Case insensitive orderBy

[ericchernuka]

I'm just running into this and thought I'd see if there's any interest in having the ability to use a localeCompare option on the orderBy rather than >|< on the string. Just running into situations where things are out of order due to casing.

[kettanaito]

Hey, @ericchernuka. Thanks for suggesting this!

I think this is a great idea. Our API is heavily inspired by Prisma, and they have a similar issue open (prisma/prisma#5068). We, however, don't have support for something like a mode property on sorting.

What do you think about the following API?

db.user.findMany({
  where: criteria,
  orderBy: {
    username: {
      direction: 'asc',
      mode: 'insensitive'
    }
  }
})

I'm not a fan of complicating the orderBy API to be either a SortDirection enum or an object of { direction: SortDirection, mode?: SortMode } though. But this may be a sensible way to do it from the user's perspective.

I'd like to hear your opinion on how you'd expect this API to look.

[ericchernuka]

@kettanaito Apologies. Still planning on getting to this. Work got a little crazy over the past few months so I haven’t had time to start on it.

[kettanaito]

No need to apologize! I'm thankful for your interest on this. Let's improve things together!

[micha149]

To be honest. My thought was to have less impact to the api, because its just two more strings. I am also fine with a object to describe the orderBy behavior.

[micha149]

OK I had a quick look to the source code and wondered what the mode could be besides default and insensitive. I thought natural could also be useful. After having a look in String.localeCompare I noticed the hint to better use Intl.Collator for large arrays. It has way more options to consider for sorting like numeric or how a and á has to be compared. Should we take this into account or just implement the insensitive mode by calling .toLowercase() on the values?

[kettanaito]

Yeah, we should begin by just converting the values to the same case. We can always improve on top of that, if necessary.