Sorting dropdown alphabetically in AngularJS

I'm populating a dropdown through the use of ng-options which is hooked to a controller that in turn is calling a service. Unfortunately the data coming in is a mess and I need to be able to sort it alphabetically.

You figure that something like $.sortBy would do it but unfortunately it didn't do jack. I know I can sort it via javascript with a helper method function asc(a,b) or something like that but I refuse to believe that there is not cleaner way of doing this plus I don't want to bloat the controller with helper methods. It is something so basic in principle so I don't understand why AngularJS doesn't have this.

Is there a way of doing something like $orderBy('asc')?

Example:

<select ng-option="items in item.$orderBy('asc')"></select>

It would be extremely useful to have options in orderBy so you can do whatever you want, whenever you usually try to sort data.

Angular has an orderBy filter that can be used like this:

<select ng-model="selected" ng-options="f.name for f in friends | orderBy:'name'"></select>

See this fiddle for an example.

It's worth noting that if track by is being used it needs to appear after the orderBy filter, like this:

<select ng-model="selected" ng-options="f.name for f in friends | orderBy:'name' track by f.id"></select>

You should be able to use filter: orderBy

orderBy can accept a third option for the reverse flag.

<select ng-option="item.name for item in items | orderBy:'name':true"></select>

Here item is sorted by 'name' property in a reversed order. The 2nd argument can be any order function, so you can sort in any rule.

@see http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.filter:orderBy