# How Twitter Handles Sorting For Their API

**Published:** 2017-05-24  
**Canonical:** https://apievangelist.com/2017/05/24/how-twitter-handles-sorting-for-their-api/

I was looking into some of the common approaches by API providers for sorting of data in API responses. I'm not in the business of finding the right answer, I am in the business of finding successful examples from APIs(brands) that people are familiar with--[I thought Twitter's page in their API documentation dedicated to sorting was worth noting](https://dev.twitter.com/ads/basics/sorting).

When you craft your Twitter API request you just append sort_by=[attribute name]-[asc/desc] where the attribute is a valid attribute that is returned in the JSON of your GET request. An example of this is using ?name-asc to sort by name alphabetically or ?name-desc to sort in reverse. Providing a pretty basic approach that API providers can consider when designing sort functionality in their API.

I'll be documenting all the approaches I find from known providers, developing a catalog of options for a variety of use cases. I'll also spend some time looking at how GraphQL tackles the problem, providing a much more holistic approach to managing data using APIs. When I go through my API design checklist each round, I like adding a variety of diverse tooling to it, based upon examples I find from the strongest API providers. [Healthy diversity in your API toolbox will be increasingly important](http://apievangelist.com/2017/03/10/focus-on-having-a-robust-and-diverse-api-toolbox/) to assist in tackling a variety of data, content, or algorithmic challenges.