Hiding sort arrows in ListGrid corners but not in the columns

[mgreenberg]

Hello Isomorphic,

We are using SmartClient Version: v8.3p_2013-07-18/Pro Deployment. We were wondering if there was a way to get rid of the sort arrow in just the corner of the ListGrid while keeping the background skin and the sort arrows for the columns. A lot of our users are getting confused with the sort arrows in the corner.

We still want the sortAscending and sortDescending images for the individual columns so setting sortAscendingImage and sortDescendingImage to null is not an option since that would remove these sort images for the columns as well as the corner of the list grid.

I tried setting showSortArrow to "field" but this gives a white background in the corner. It would be nice if just the arrow was not there but the gray background still was since it looks a little out of place (see screenshot).

isc.ListGrid.create({
    ID: "countryList",
    width:500, height:224, alternateRecordStyles:true,
    data: countryData,
    fields:[
        {name:"countryCode", title:"Flag", width:50, type:"image", imageURLPrefix:"flags/16/", imageURLSuffix:".png"},
        {name:"countryName", title:"Country"}
    ],
    // initial sort on Population, high-to-low
    sortFieldNum: 1,
    sortDirection: "descending",
    showSortArrow: "field" // other values: "field", "both", "none"
})

Thanks.

[Isomorphic]

Sorry, there's not currently an option in between hiding it and showing it.

Could you clarify how your users are confused? What is it that they are confused about?

[mgreenberg]

Thanks for your quick response! It would be nice to have a way to show/hide the sortAscending and sortDescending images for just the columns or just the corners.

Our users just haven't seen anything like that in any other applications out there (e.g. Excel). They are also getting confused since there is no clear label saying what the sort icons in the corner do. They may think the icons in the corner are only for the last column. This is different for the columns where its pretty obvious what the sort descending and ascending icons represent.

[mgreenberg]

I wanted to reword my latest post about the requested feature. Setting showSortArrow to "field" does what we want to do (since it doesn't show the sort arrow images in the corner) with the exception that it doesn't retain the gray CSS background style. The white background looks out of place. It would be nice if we could retain the gray background when showSortArrow is set to "field."

[Isomorphic]

Sorry, again there's no setting for this. There simply is no element there at all if you disable the corner sort arrow, so there's no way to style just that one spot.

We've never seen any user confused by this - it's a relatively common interface seen in Thunderbird, some versions of Outlook, and elsewhere - but if you're really sure you've got an exceptional group of users, you can addChild() on the ListGrid to place an inert Canvas in that corner with styling to match the rest of the header.