Alphabetize Nested List in Task Report | Adobe Higher Education
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Mikaela-Newell
Mikaela-Newell
Level 3
February 17, 2026
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Alphabetize Nested List in Task Report

  • February 17, 2026
  • 1 svar
  • 11 visningar

Hi all!

I know this will probably get the standard response that nested lists cannot pull data in a specific order, but asking anyhow😅

I’m pulling child tasks as a nested list like this:

displayname=Child Tasks
listdelimiter=<p>
listmethod=nested(children).lists
type=iterate
valueexpression=CONCAT({taskNumber},". ",{name}," (",{status},")")
valueformat=HTML

… can I then add something that sorts it alphabetically? I assume not, because I haven’t been able to find anything, but here’s hoping!

TYIA!

1 svar

skyehansen
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
skyehansenCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
February 17, 2026

You’re correct, can’t be done. 

By which I mean that it would be a huge pain in the neck to do, and probably involve a massive calculation like “if it starts with A, concat the task number, name and status; if it starts with B, concat the task number, name and status,” all the way to Z. (Additionally it would probably timeout the report to have to churn through 26 calculations…. 36 if you’re counting numbers as well)

KatherineLa
Community Advisor
KatherineLaCommunity Advisor
Community Advisor
February 17, 2026

Skye is correct, collections data cannot be influenced by sorting logic. 

I did have a fit of insanity one day, and seriously considered re-creating a bunch of fields in alphabetical order to migrate the data over. My testing on custom form field collection data showed it was sorting in order of when the field was created on the form. 

Thankfully, I recovered my sanity before attempting something that insane.!

 

In any case, that wouldn’t work for collections like task data from your report.

Mikaela-Newell
Mikaela-NewellSkribent
Level 3
February 17, 2026

Thank you ​@skyehansen and ​@KatherineLa — truly one of the most maddening things in text mode🙄 That’s super interesting what you said, Katherine… the tasks I’m pulling in my report are all coming from projects created using a template, so I guess they’re all created at the same time.

Follow up to what you said, Skye: For my report, I’m pulling a parent task per line + listing its children in a column as a nested list. There’s 5 child tasks by default, but could be more or less.

Is there a way to tell the report (in a series of shared columns) to look for the first/second/third/etc child task and then CONCAT that info? I think it’d just require IF expressions to filter for task # and “is child” of correct parent task… I’m just not sure how to (for lack of better phrasing) reference the first cell in the line of the report, aka parent task #.

… Did that make any sense? I’m gonna try to work on this myself, but in my role I’m not even supposed to work on reporting and you guys are the wizards haha

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