Collections - Sorting Results

[Jason_JB]

Hi - has anyone figured out a creative workaround to the functionality limitation where results in a collection appear in a random order? (or what the underlying logic for the sort actually is)

I've been digging through old discussion threads and most seem at least a couple years (if not 6 years) old. I'm working on a report that summarizes information so each project has a single row. One of the data elements that needs included is every start date of tasks with a specific attribute (aka custom field value). I can get the dates to appear, but they are in a random order - which makes consuming the information confusing.

Thank you!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Jason,

Since collections cannot be sorted (or aggregated), one tedious, inefficient, difficult to maintain, crude (still interested?) workaround is to carefully add a separate column (left-to-right) that in each uses a textmode collection with a valueexpression=IF(....) to sift for and display only the particular task matching that particular column, then with those all (expensively) in hand, stitching (right-to-left) those columns together using sharecol=true to effectively collapse them all into a single “sorted” (sorta) cell.

Alternatively, I invite you to consider our Magic Reports solution.

Regards,

Doug

[Jason_JB]

Thanks for the suggestion! It gave me some ideas to pursue. I ended up being blocked with how to get an if statement that would only return one result in a collection.

Leaving a note in case it helps someone in the future - I ended up creating a Fusion scenario that gathers the data into an array, sorts the array, then writes the results to a custom field. Then I've pulled that custom field into the report.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Well done Jason: Brute Force wins the day. Again.

For those without Fusion, here are a couple of valuexpression= examples for the crude approach I'd mentioned:

IF(templateTask:name='Template Task Name XYZ',name,'')

or

IF(milestone:name='Milestone Name QRS',name,'')

or

IF(name='Task Name ABC',name,'')

Regards,

Doug