Sorting by Condition

[DavidNg1]

Hello, I am reaching out to the community after exhaustively trying to find a solution/workaround. Use Case: We want to sort by condition such that the items in the most danger will be at the top or bottom. "In Trouble" > "At Risk" > "On Time" Expected/Goal: We would expect that "In Trouble" and "On Time" to be at the outer spectrum when sorting by condition. Observed: "In Trouble" is always in the middle with "At Risk" at the top/outside spectrum. Workaround attempt: We tried derived value alias for these field values, creating "3 - In Trouble", "2 - At Risk" and various other naming attempts to achieve our sort order, but We also tried looking into text mode, but are unsure of its capability. The community "text mode library" and workfront-support pages did not seem to have anything directly related to what we need, for example, having the column sortable by values alphanumerically rather than an arbitrary back-end value (what we assume based on observance). TIA David Ngo JLL

[NRYNR]

I recently worked on a dashboard along the lines of project condition. The top is an overall project report based on condition. Down the left I have 3 project reports: 1) Late Projects; 2)At Risk & Behind Projects; 3)On-Time Projects Down the right are correlating task reports used to help a manager identify what's needed as a next step .

[Dr_DougWi]

You are on the right track here. I have often added several reporting custom fields to a special reporting section to a project form. In that custom form section, I place fields that need to be manipulated / calculated to be used in reporting like your sorting need. The key is to create the custom fields with the calculations needed for display features like sorting, custom text on out-of-box-unchangeable fields, too distant field values (user values on portfolio in the project), etc. All of these are fun to work with! Just think a little more like a programmer in toy land for moving values around and tweaking their display values. Ping me directly if you need a hand setting up the calculation in the custom field. Doug Williams

[DavidNg1]

@Narayan Raum @Doug Williams Thank you for your suggestions and help. Ultimately, we went with the solution of custom calculated field and hidden sort dependency. 1) Custom field creation of ConditionSort IF(Condition="ON","3-On Target",(IF(Condition="AR","2-At Risk",(IF(Condition="IT","1-In Trouble","Blank"))))) 2) Add custom field to report, sort, apply dependency sort code in text mode to original Condition field. querysort=DE:ConditionSort sortType=asc sortOrder=2 3) Remove custom field from report 4) "Recalculate custom expressions" for all preexisting projects David Ngo JLL

[Dr_DougWi]

Good to see the answer that you pursued. There are so many possibilities using the model you used across the native Workfront fields. Doug Williams