Pagination Needs a Stable Order

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A financial report encoded two sort rules as one string:

lowercased customer name + "-" + customer identifier

Sharded tests with concurrently created identifiers exposed unreliable output. The correction stopped asking a compound string to express precedence. It compared names directly and consulted the stable customer identifier only when the names matched.

The retained diff does not prove that equal names alone caused the failing order. It does expose the rule every paginator depends on: the primary comparison, tie-breaker, and comparison semantics must be explicit, and each row needs exactly one reproducible position.

Backfills on Brian Faust

Pagination Needs a Stable Order