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

Alphabetize Nested List in Task Report

  • February 17, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 11 views

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 reply

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.

KatherineLa
Community Advisor
KatherineLaCommunity Advisor
Community Advisor
February 19, 2026

@Mikaela-Newell Nothing specific springs to mind for clever work-arounds. In your shoes, I’d start over with a task-level report and then group by the parent task to achieve something similar. Then you could sort by the task-level information as needed. 

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