Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 3

Update 22 Jan 2013: Demo file and screen shots have been revised to fix bugs identified by Matt Ayres and David Schwartz (see comments at the end of article).

Ever since I posted part 2 of this series, I’ve been torn between, on the one hand, wanting to move on to other topics, and on the other, the realization that I wasn’t quite done with this one yet. So, here is what I expect will be my final posting, and final demo (dynamic list sorting, v3 rev5), on this subject.

Thus far, we’ve looked at various methods to facilitate dynamic list sorting (by “dynamic” I mean that the field to be sorted is determined programatically). Most of these methods use two fields — one of them uses four — and you can see them all in part 2.

But in the back of my mind has been the knowledge that Ugo Di Luca pulled this off with a single field back in 2004 (EasySort.fp7, shared by permission of the author, and previously discussed last April in an article entitled Portal Sorting, pt 3).

Continue reading “Easy Sorting of List Views, part 3”

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 2

Well, I thought I’d said everything I had to say on this subject, but yesterday afternoon I noticed a glaring omission in part 1’s demo — what happens if the user manually unsorts the found set?

The sort indicator doesn’t disappear the way a good little sort indicator should. Fortunately this is easily remedied, thanks to the Get(SortState) function. Continue reading “Easy Sorting of List Views, part 2”

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later

Easy Sorting of List Views, part 1

Earlier this year, I posted a three-part series on Portal Sorting, and part 2 focused on dynamically sorting a portal when a column heading was clicked. Well, with just a few tweaks, this technique can be applied to dynamic sorting of found sets, and of course the most likely place to employ something like this would be on a list view.

I should note that on very large found sets, sorts using this technique can be noticeably slower than traditional “hard-coded” scripted sorts. (Performance is fine with normal found set sizes.) The benefit of using this technique, is that a new field can be added to a layout and sort-enabled in about 60 seconds without touching the script itself.

Continue reading “Easy Sorting of List Views, part 1”

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 10 or later

Portal Sorting, part 2

The other day we looked at static portal sorting, where the developer decides in advance how the portal will sort, and “hard codes” those settings into the portal. Sometimes, though, we want to provide users with an interface where they can dynamically sort a portal by clicking on column headings…

…and we’re going to look at a technique to accomplish this today. Continue reading “Portal Sorting, part 2”