Having Trouble Sorting by a Particular Column in a Report

[TimBaker]

This one particular column in a report I'm building won't let me sort by it, and it's the one column I NEED to sort by.

We have several Project Managers on our team who collectively manage all projects in our dept. These PMs are assigned to a project via a checkbox-formatted custom form. I was asked to provide a report to our leadership showing all active projects, and which PM is assigned to each (Super easy. Already did that. Don't need help there).

But my issue is that the report is sorted so that the PM names aren't grouped by person. They're all jumbled because the report is sorting by another column. The function to sort by the Project Manager Assignment column is completely missing from that column in the editor. **I've attached pictures of what I'm referring to**

Can anyone please help? How can I get this report to sort by PM name?

Thank you.

[KellieGardner]

I have a couple of follow-up questions:

What type of field is the project manager assignment?

Is this a project report and the field lives at the project level on the custom form?

One thing you can try doing is forcing the sort. If you switch to text mode on that field and add this:

sortOrder=1
sortType=asc

[TimBaker]

Thanks Kellie,

The field type is checkbox (text)

Yes, it is a Project report, and yes, the field lives on the project level.

I tried forcing the sort via text mode using your code. The report would then not run. I got an error box at the bottom that said "Invalid Parameter: Search Parameter value "null""

I've attached a pic.

[KellieGardner · Accepted solution]

Is the checkbox field a multi-select checkbox?

[TimBaker]

Interesting question. Yes, it is. 

So, based on your question, I went back and converted it to radio buttons rather than a  checkbox. And that did allow me to sort by that column. *However* when I tried to save and run the report it would not populate, and I got the same error message: "Invalid Parameter: Search Parameter value "null""

[skyehansen]

I sometimes get this sort of error when my Filters are slightly off. As a troubleshooting step, you could start a new project report with no filters or groupings or any sort and just add that one column and sort by it. If this works, then you know something else is wrong with your current report.

[TimBaker]

Thanks so much, Skye. I removed all my filters and tested it, and still got the same error, so this clearly has something to do with the data within that custom form. However, After I converted the custom form to radio buttons (rather than checkboxes), I was able to add a grouping based on that custom form, which I wasn't able to do before. This enabled me to group the results by PM name, which is what I needed. I'll take this as a win for now. Thank you!