This happens to me also, I'm using version 0.6.0 though

I recently ran into this. The CSV row order is determined by the database primary key, as it uses find_each to avoid loading all records into memory simultaneously. see this code:

https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin/blob/master/lib/rails_admin/support/csv_converter.rb#L74

Rails requires ordering by primary key for find_each, so it would be necessary to avoid using find_each in order to preserve sort order. However, this is a little tricky because we still want to avoid loading all records into memory to generate a CSV.

Some potential solutions may include rewriting to use a streaming SQL query, or using some form of pagination. This may expose performance problems as arbitrary sorting and filtering without indexes at large scale is problematic.

EDIT: here are some logs confirming the problem when exporting to CSV --

Without making any specific promises, I'm going to attempt to hack a solution this week.