How to do LiveView stream sorting?

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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My app lets people connect their Garmin, Apple Watch, etc, to track activities, join virtual races, and create adventure activity plans. I have a leaderboard which is backed by a LiveView, in turn subscribed to a pub sub channel.

I’m using |> stream to add leaderboard data into my LiveView. When a new activity comes in from the provider, I broadcast a message with the new aggregate data for that runner.

And like magic, my leaderboard LiveView updates. There’s just one problem. Sorting!

If a runner overtakes another, the leaderboard is out of order. One simple fix is just to recompute the whole thing. But that feels inefficient — I can’t rely on stream_insert anymore.

Yet sorting at the template level also seems like it violates the design intention of streams.

Any thoughts on the “right” way to resolve this? Thank you!

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The stream_insert/4 function accepts an :at argument to specify where to insert an item. I’m not sure if it works for updates though, and the docs seem to suggest it does not although it’s a bit vague.

However, you should be able to call stream_delete/3 and then stream_insert/4 in that case to forcibly relocate the item in the DOM.

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A quick thought is to continue using streams to add/update new data, but use a JS hook client-side to resort after update. You could do this if you added data-sort-value={@your_sorting_value} to the leader board items, and after the resort, trim excess elements.

The advantage of this is that you don’t need to track which position it belongs in server-side.