Free jqGrid - Sorting order issue

Question

I was using 4.10 up till today. I'm now upgrading to 4.13 (latest) so doing some regressions.

The first thing I've noticed is the multi sorting order.

In 4.10, the multi sorting order was by the order of the column (from left to right).

In 4.13.5 (latest), the sorting order is by what column was chosen first.

The right behavior (IMO) should be by the order of the column, so if one reorder the column, the most left column takes over and become the first element by which the sorting is applied.

the current new behavior were the sorting is based on "first selected, always first" is confusing, as the user can't tell by which order the multi sorting is applied.

Explanation:

Looking at the below 2 tables, you can see they are sorted by two columns, 'Total Runs' & 'Start Time':

Both tables holds the exact same data, sorted the exact same way, and still, they are showing different results for the sorting.

The reason for the different result, is that the index of the sorting is being built by the order of which the user clicked on the sorting, and not by the order of the columns (were the most left takes over in the index). This is not by the standard, as users don't have any way to figure out by which column is the master out of two column in such a multi column search. In 4.10, the order was fixed, so if user wanted to change the order he had to move the columns to the right (or left). At least this gives some indication which column takes first.

I don't say that using columns for ordering a multi search is best practice, but at least it gave some indication. In the current implementation there is no indication what so ever. This is especially confusing when loading pre-define filtering.

Thanks,

Tal.

Answer 1

First of all, the latest version of free jqGrid is 4.13.6. It's published 10 days ago (2016-12-24). The version 4.13.5 was published at 3 Nov 2016.

The order of sorting in case of multi sorting (multiSort: true) is important for the final results. The user should be able to specify the order to have the result, which he/she want to have. The old behavior allowed no freedom for the user. Because of that the behavior was fixed. If you specify the order in sortname then one should just be careful in order of columns. The string

p.sortname + " " + p.sortorder

defines the order, which will be used for sorting. If you really need to have some fixed oder of sorting then you can try to "normilize" p.sortname inside of onSortCol callback.