Sort by Last Access Time | Dataford Interview Questions

The Workiva platform records recent access events for documents. Given a list of document records, return a new list ordered from most recently accessed to least recently accessed.

If two documents have the same last_access timestamp, order them by document_id in ascending lexicographic order. Do not modify the input list.

Formal Specification

Implement sort_documents(documents), where documents is a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary contains:

document_id: a unique string
last_access: an integer Unix timestamp

Return a new list containing the same dictionaries in the required order. The original list and its dictionaries must remain unchanged.

Constraints

0 <= len(documents) <= 10^5
Each document_id is a unique non-empty string of length at most 100
0 <= last_access <= 10^15
The input list must not be modified

Function Signature

def sort_documents(documents):

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