question about sorts in a custom collection

[Andrew Bennett]

Oops! I meant to send this to the list. I blame gmail for being
well-intentioned and trying to not reply-to-all :) There is nothing
earth-shattering here, but it might be useful to have this in the list
archives:

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:38 PM, Peter Alcibiades <
palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

When sorted on this field, the records come out sorted as quoted above.
> Is there any way to have the sort place them into ascending order like the
> following?
>
> A:1996.1.4
> A:1996.1.5
> A:1996.1.6
> A:1996.10
> A:1996.11.1
> A:1996.11.2
> A:1996.12
> A:1996.12
> A:1996.100.1
> A:1996.100.2
>
A well-known method is to prefix the shorter numbers with 0s.  So change
A:1996.1.4 to A.1996.001.04.  You need as many prefixed 0s as the longest
number, so if A:1996.1000.101 is possible, use A.1996.0001.004.  It's not
ideal from the user standpoint, but you may be able to implement it
relatively easily and the fields will be sorted properly after that.  The
numbers are still human-readable, although there is a little bit of "noise."

Of course, ideally, you want your software to do this kind of thing for you
:) but to accomplish that you may have to either modify the source code
yourself to sort differently on that one field or else persuade Robby to
implement a Custom Sort feature :).


Andrew

---
Andrew Bennett
drewbenn at gmail.com
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