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Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:44:16 +0200
From: Nils Breunese <n.breunese@vpro.nl>
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To: CouchDB Users <user@couchdb.apache.org>
Subject: Sorting view queries
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Hello all,

We set out to use CouchDB as a piece of software that can easily be used 
to create REST APIs. We publish documents to CouchDB, add some views and 
show/list functions, put Apache httpd+mod_rewrite in front for the 
pretty URLs and there is your super fast REST API!

Well, that was the idea, but we ran into an issue. We have a view that 
returns events with start and end timestamps. It should be possible to 
ask the API for a list of current events and events that are upcoming. I 
thought I'd just emit the end timestamp as the key and query using 
startkey=currenttime. This returns the correct events, but the list is 
sorted by end timestamp.

The API would make a lot more sense if it would return a list sorted by 
start timestamp, but I don't see a way to do this without adding some 
server-side logic to sort the results from the view query. This would 
mean adding another layer to the setup: more complexity and loss of 
performance probably. Is it really not possible to accomplish this with 
just CouchDB or do I miss some way of mapping and/or querying the data 
which does yield the desired result?

Nils Breunese.