orderby nodename but treat as an integer

[B_Stockwell]

I'm storing news releases in cq:page nodes with name corresponding to the release ID--which are integers that increment by 1 with each new release created. I need to be able to sort these release by the release ID to do a variety of operation, in this case to get the highest numbered release. Unfortunately I can't rely on jcr:created for this because there are special cases where the highest numbered release will not correspond to the last created page (support for a legacy system). 

I've been experimenting with the query debugger to try to figure out how I would retrieve this, but when I sort on nodename, it orders results not as numbers, but strings, thus, I get results like "9000, 8200, 81320, 7000, 22000, 1700, 12000" Is there a way to cast my orderby property to an int? Or am I maybe going about this the wrong way?

type=cq:page path=/content/news orderby=nodename orderby.sort=desc

[smacdonald2008]

Because the node name is a string - you cannot order it as if it's a numeric value:

http://www.day.com/specs/jcr/1.0/6.6.3.5_Ordering_Specifier.html

If you want to order these nodes using a numeric value- place a child node on the page of type nt:unstructured (you cannot place a custom numeric property on a page node).

Place a custom numeric property on the child node and order by this numeric prop.  Then you will have an order collection based on a numeric value.   (this is one way to do this). 

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

IIRC you cannot cast in the "order by" statement. What you can do is to create an integer property "releaseID" and sort by this property. Then you should have a numerical comparison instead a string-based one.

kind regards,
Jörg