Auto-assigning objects to users based on priority in Postgres/Ruby on Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm building a rails app for managing a queue of work items. I have several types of users ("access levels") to whom I want to auto-assign these work items.
The end goal is an "Auto-assign" button on one of my views that will automatically grab the next work item based on a priority, which is defined by the users's access level.
I'm trying to set up a class method in my work_item model to automatically sort work items by type based on the user's access level. I am looking at something like this:
def self.auto_assign_next(access_level)
case
when access_level = 2
where("completed = 'f'").order("requested_time ASC").limit(1)
when access_level > 2
where("completed = 'f'").order("CASE WHEN form='supervisor' THEN 1 WHEN form='installer' THEN 2 WHEN form='repair' THEN 3 WHEN form='mail' THEN 4 WHEN form='hp' THEN 5 ELSE 6 END").limit(1)
end
This isn't very DRY, though. Ideally I'd like the sort order to be configurable by administrators, so maybe setting up a separate table on which the sort order is kept would be best. The problem with that idea is that I have no idea how to pass the priority order on that table to the [postgre]SQL query. I'm new to SQL in general and somewhat lost with this one. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how this should be handled?

Answer 1

One fairly simple approach starts with turning your case statement into a new table, listing form values versus what precedence value they should be sorted by:
id | form | precedence
-----------------------------------
1 | supervisor | 1
2 | installer | 2
(etc)
Create a model for this, say, FormPrecedences (not a great name, but I don't totally grok your data model so pick one that better describes it). Then, your query can look like this (note: I'm assuming your current model is called WorkItems):
when access_level > 2
joins("LEFT JOIN form_precedences ON form_precedences.form = work_items.form")
.where("completed = 'f'")
.order("COALESCE(form_precedences.precedence, 6)")
.limit(1)
The way this works isn't as complicated as it looks. A "left join" in SQL simply takes all the rows of the table on the left (in this case, work_items) and, for each row, finds all the matching rows from the table on the right (form_precedences, where "matching" is defined by the bit after the "ON" keyword: form_precedences.form = work_items.form), and emits one combined row. If no match is found, a LEFT JOIN will still emit a row, but with all the right-hand values being NULL. A normal join would skip any rows with no right-hand match found.
Anyway, with the precedence data joined on to our work items, we can just sort by the precedence value. But, in case no match was found during the join above, that value will be NULL -- so, I use COALESCE (which returns the first of its arguments that's not NULL) to default to a precedence of 6.
Hope that helps!