Sorting objects by field availability - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a place object that has the following parameters: phone, category, street, zip, website.
I also have an array of place objects: [place1, place2, place3, place4, place5].
What's the best way to sort the array of places, based on the parameter availability? I.e., if place1 has the most available parameters, or the least number of parameters that are nil, it should be reordered to first and so on.
Edit: These objects are not ActiveRecord objects

Answer 1

I'd let each Place object know how complete it was:
class Place
attr_accessor :phone, :category, :street, :website, :zip
def completeness
attributes.count{|_,value| value.present?}
end
end
Then it is easy to sort your place objects by completeness:
places.sort_by(&:completeness)
Edit: Non-ActiveRecord solution:
I had assumed this was an ActiveRecord model because of the Ruby on Rails tag. Since this is a non-ActiveRecord model, you can use instance_variables instead of attributes. (By the way, congratulations for knowing that domain models in Rails don't have to inherit from ActiveRecord)
class Place
attr_accessor :phone, :category, :street, :website, :zip
def completeness
instance_variables.count{|v| instance_variable_get(v).present?}
end
end
Edit 2: Weighted attributes
You have a comment about calculating a weighted score. In this case, or when you want to choose specific attributes, you can put the following in your model:
ATTR_WEIGHTS = {phone:1, category:1, street:2, website:1, zip:2}
def completeness
ATTR_WEIGHTS.select{|k,v| instance_variable_get(k).present?}.sum(&:last)
end
Note that the sum(&:last) is equivalent to sum{|k,v| v} which in turn is a railsism for reduce(0){|sum, (k,v)| sum += v}.

Answer 2

I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but this is a start :
ruby fat one liner
values = {phone: 5, category: 3, street: 5, website: 3, zip: 5} #Edit these values to ponderate.
array = [place1, place2, place3, place4, place5]
sorted_array = array.sort_by{ |b| b.attributes.select{ |k, v| values.keys.include?(k.to_sym) && v.present? }.inject(0){ |sum, n| sum + values[n[0]] } }.reverse
So we're basically creating a sub-hash of the attributes of your ActiveRecord object by only picking the key-value pairs that are in the values hash and only if they have a present? value.
Then on this sub-hash, we're invoking inject that will sum the ponderated values we've put in the values hash. Finally, we reverse everything so you have the highest score first.
To make it clean, I suggest you implement a method that will compute the score of each object in an instance method in your model, like mark suggested

Answer 3

If you have a class Place:
class Place
attr_accessor :phone, :category, :street, :website, :zip
end
and you create an instance place1:
place1 = Place.new
place1.instance_variables # => []
place1.instance_variables.size # => 0
place1.phone = '555-1212' # => "555-1212"
place1.instance_variables # => [ :#phone ]
place1.instance_variables.size # => 1
And create the next instance:
place2 = Place.new
place2.phone = '555-1212'
place2.zip = '00000'
place2.instance_variables # => [ :#phone, :#zip ]
place2.instance_variables.size # => 2
You can sort by an ascending number of instance variables that have been set:
[place1, place2].sort_by{ |p| p.instance_variables.size }
# => [ #<Place:0x007fa8a32b51a8 #phone="555-1212">, #<Place:0x007fa8a31f5380 #phone="555-1212", #zip="00000"> ]
Or sort in descending order:
[place1, place2].sort_by{ |p| p.instance_variables.size }.reverse
# => [ #<Place:0x007fa8a31f5380 #phone="555-1212", #zip="00000">, #<Place:0x007fa8a32b51a8 #phone="555-1212"> ]
This uses basic Ruby objects, Rails is not needed, and it asks the object instances themselves what is set, so you don't have to maintain any external lists of attributes.
Note: this breaks if you set an instance variable to something, then set it back to nil.
This fixes it:
[place1,place2].sort_by{ |p|
p.instance_variables.reject{ |v|
p.instance_variable_get(v).nil?
}.size
}.reverse
and this shortens it by using Enumerable's count with a block:
[place1,place2].sort_by{ |p|
p.instance_variables.count{ |v|
!p.instance_variable_get(v).nil?
}
}.reverse