Ruby on Rails has the great find(:first) method that lets you grab the very first ActiveRecord object out of a given database table. That’s all well and good, but what if you want the last? Use this: Model.find(:first, :order => “id DESC”). That will give you the first record in a reversed list of IDs: basically, the record with the highest ID value, or the last record in the table.

Not good enough for you? Order by any other field. Want a different first record ? Sort by a field ASC. The :first record really depends on what order your records are in.

technorati tags:rubyonrails, RoR, Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 10:57 pm and is filed under code, learn, ruby on rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.