Gatsby: GraphQL query - sort nulls last

[larryhudson]

Hi everyone, I'm so impressed with Gatsby! I'm just having an issue where I'm sorting Contentful items by date (descending), but date isn't a required field. Items without a date (returning a null value) are at the top of the list. Is there an option for having 'nulls last' when sorting?

Here's the code for my query:

query categoryItemsQuery($slug: String!) {
  allContentfulPortfolioItem(
    filter: { categories: { slug: { eq: $slug } } },
    sort: {fields: [date], order: DESC}) {
    edges {
      node {
        id
      }
    }
  }
}

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this! Thanks for all your hard work.

[pieh]

You have currently 2 options:

• make 2 separate queries (1 for sorted items with date and second for items without date) and concatenate them in your page component:

query categoryItemsQuery($slug: String!) {
  withDate:allContentfulPortfolioItem(
    filter: { categories: { slug: { eq: $slug } }, date: { ne: null } },
    sort: {fields: [date], order: DESC}) {
    edges {
      node {
        id
      }
    }
  }
  withoutDate:allContentfulPortfolioItem(
    filter: { categories: { slug: { eq: $slug } }, date: { eq: null } }) {
    edges {
      node {
        id
      }
    }
  }
}

and then in your component use this.props.data.withDate and this.props.data.withoutDate

• or add sortDate field to your Portfolio Item node in gatsby-node.js:

exports.onCreateNode = ({ node, boundActionCreators }) => {
  const { createNodeField } = boundActionCreators
  if (node.internal.type === `NameOfType`) { // name of type you can get in graphiql in docs section or by ctrl+clicking on `node` field in your query
    createNodeField({
      node,
      name: `sortDate`,
      value: node.date || "1970-01-01", // either date if node has this field or very early date that should be before any of the date in content
    })
  }
};

and then sort by fields__sortDate

All the examples are written without testing, so this might not work out of the box - but hope approaches are readable

[KyleAMathews]

It seems reasonable too to change our sorting so nodes without the sort field always are at the end.

[KyleAMathews]

@larryhudson you could add this at https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/e4bbeb3b57c27a29217ca43e29c5dd520d034771/packages/gatsby/src/schema/run-sift.js#L166-L173

[KyleAMathews]

Due to the high volume of issues, we're closing out older ones without recent activity. Please open a new issue if you need help!