Re: Recursive CTE trees + Sorting by votes

> Or another idea, add a column that is the path of the parent:

I don't think this will work. The problem is you need the full path to
keep the children with their parents, but you also need the score. If
you make the path an array of (-votes, id) tuples (perhaps flattened
for simplicity), then you get the correct ordering. That way at every
stage you are sorting by votes, but still keeping children with their
parents:

comments=> WITH RECURSIVE cte (id, message, author, path, parent_id,
depth, votes)  AS (
    SELECT  id,
        message,
        author,
        array[-votes,id] AS path,
        parent_id,
        1 AS depth, votes
    FROM    comments
    WHERE   parent_id IS NULL
    UNION ALL
    SELECT  comments.id,
        comments.message,
        comments.author,
        cte.path || -comments.votes || comments.id,
        comments.parent_id,
        cte.depth + 1 AS depth, comments.votes
    FROM    comments
    JOIN cte ON comments.parent_id = cte.id
    )
    SELECT id, message, author, path, depth, votes FROM cte
ORDER BY path;
 id |           message           | author |       path        | depth | votes
----+-----------------------------+--------+-------------------+-------+-------
  5 | Very interesting post!      | thedz  | {-3,5}            |     1 |     3
  8 | Fo sho, Yall                | Mac    | {-3,5,-12,8}      |     2 |    12
  7 | Agreed                      | G      | {-3,5,-5,7}       |     2 |     5
  6 | You sir, are wrong          | Chris  | {-3,5,-3,6}       |     2 |     3
  1 | This thread is really cool! | David  | {-1,1}            |     1 |     1
  3 | I agree David!              | Daniel | {-1,1,-4,3}       |     2 |     4
  2 | Ya David, we love it!       | Jason  | {-1,1,-3,2}       |     2 |     3
  4 | gift Jason                  | Anton  | {-1,1,-3,2,-15,4} |     3 |    15
(8 rows)

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