Custom sort order with paging and enums

[mgreenberg]

I have some questions on sorting best practices with enums and custom sorting with and without paging in a list grid. We are using Smart Client v8.3p_2013-07-18/Pro Deployment and have a data source that has a field 'aStatusField' of type enum. When I sort this column in the ListGrid, it sorts them alphabetically - "In Progress," "Resolved," and "Unresolved." However, I want to have them logically sorted as "Unresolved," "In Progress," and "Resolved." The data source and the java enum for representing the Status is copied below.

<DataSource ID="MyPageDS" serverConstructor="spring:myPageDataSource"
	schemaBean="com.mycompany.MyPage" validateRelatedRecords="true">
	<fields>
		<field primaryKey="true" name="id" title="ID" type="sequence" />
		…
		<field name="aStatusField" type="enum" valueMapEnum="com.mycompany.StatusEnum" />
	</fields>

</DataSource>

public enum StatusEnum {

	Unresolved("Unresolved"),
	InProgress("In Progress"),
	Resolved("Resolved");

	private String value;

	private int order;

	private StatusEnum(final String value) {

		this.value = value;
	}
}

I have been reading up a lot on sorting and I understand that sorting has to be done differently on the server-side and client-side.

If sorting is done on the client-side, I can have a sortNormalizer function on the status field in the ListGrid and could have a map representing the text value and the order similar to the java enum.

var statusSortMap = {
	"Unresolved": 1,
	"In Progress": 2,
	"Resolved": 3
};
…
sortNormalizer: function(record, fieldName) {
	var status = record.aStatusField;
	return statusSortMap[status];
}

However, it would be ideal if I could use the enum itself for this. Is there a way to do this? Below is the snippet for the data source generated.

isc.DataSource.create({
    ID:"MyPageDS",
    ...
	fields: [
		...
		{
			valueMap:{
				Resolved:"Resolved",
				Unresolved:"Unresolved",
				InProgress:"In Progress"
			},
			valueMapEnum:"com.mycompany.StatusEnum",
			name:"aStatusField",
			type:"enum"
		}
	]
})

Thanks for your help in advance.

[Isomorphic]

Seems like your question boils down to how to do an alphabetic sort in SQL for a numeric column.

This differs a bit by browser but is generally a CASE statement (MySQL, SQLServer) or DECODE statement (Oracle).

SQLDataSource automatically handles this, so you can take a look at various samples and watch the server logs to see some sample syntax.

[mgreenberg]

I have modified our code to use intEnums in the datasource in the hope that I could sort based on the ordinal value for the enum. I tried setting sortByMappedValue to false in the ListGridField 'aStatusField' but it doesn't sort based on the enum ordinal. Am I missing something?

Here is the DS.xml

<DataSource ID="MyPageDS" serverConstructor="spring:myPageDataSource"
	schemaBean="com.mycompany.MyPage" validateRelatedRecords="true">
	<fields>
		<field primaryKey="true" name="id" title="ID" type="sequence" />
		…
		<field name="aStatusField" type="intEnum" valueMapEnum="com.mycompany.StatusEnum" />
	</fields>

</DataSource>

and here is the data source created when I view source on the page. For some reason, there seems to be two different representations for aStatusField - one with the ordinals and one without. This seemed suspicious and maybe it is using that field definition instead of the field definition for the enum ordinals for client-side sorting.

isc.DataSource.create({
allowAdvancedCriteria:true,
validateRelatedRecords:true,
ID:"MyPageDS",
operationBindings:[
	{
		operationType:"fetch"	
	}
],
inheritsFrom:isc.DataSource.create({
	allowAdvancedCriteria:true,
	serverType:null,
	generatedBy:"v8.3p_2013-07-18/Pro Deployment 2013-07-18",
	xmlFromConfig:"true",
	ID:"MyPageDS_inheritsFrom",
	dataSourceVersion:"1",
	fields:[
		....
		{
			valueMap:{
				Resolved:"Resolved",
				InProgress:"In Progress",
				Unresolved:"Unresolved"
			},
			name:"aStatusField",
			type:"enum"
		},
		....
	]
})
,
fields:[
	....
	{
		valueMap:{
			"0":"Unresolved",
			"1":"In Progress",
			"2":"Resolved"
		},
		valueMapEnum:"com.mycompany.StatusEnum",
		name:"aStatusField",
		type:"intEnum"
	},
	....
]
})

[mgreenberg]

Thanks to the responses to my other forum post at http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?p=108602, the solution to this was to set the enumTranslationStrategy in the datasource to "ordinal" and that sorted this column based on the ordinal value instead of the string value.