Change default sorting from ASCII to alphabetical

[jonas-silver-ledge]

Hello,
our customer wishes for his tables to be sorted case-insensitive. Is there a setting in the SME that achieves this?

Problem
When making a column sortable the only option available is the preferred sorting (ASC / DESC). Unfortunately lower and upper case words are treated differently and we did not find a setting to change the sorting behaviour.

Example
Values: a, B, A, z, b
actual sorting behavior: A, B, a, b, z
desired sorting behavior: A, a, B, b, z

Problem resolution attempts
We found the following topic while looking for a solution to our problem, but the suggested solution is limited to older versions of a12.

Can Search Engine support Sorting in alphabetical order, not Ascii Sorting?

It seems that SE is sorting text fields in Ascii order. For example, given these texts, and I want to sort in ascending order: a B A z _ SE returns the texts follows ASCII order as below: A B _ a z But in standard Alphabetical order, it should be: _ A a B z There is a tool to check it Put any text in Alphabetical Order with this free tool Is there any way to have the result as in the second example? Thanks

[petr-high-peak]

Hi @jonas-silver-ledge, updating Solr schema should still be an option.

[felix-blazing-river]

Hey @jonas-silver-ledge,

if you speak about tables/repeats in the Form Engine, there is the setting Alphabetical Sorting in the Document Model. Ticking it for the respective fields should solve this issue:

[jonas-silver-ledge]

@felix-blazing-river, thanks for your reply!
We need to sort values in an Overview Model. Unfortunately checking the alphabetical sorting option in the corresponding Domain Model didnt correct the Overview Model sorting.

[jonas-silver-ledge]

@petr-high-peak:
I managed to copy and overwrite the default solr-config. Specify specific schema.xml for solr? - #4 by tbarros was helpful in that regard.
For our default sorting i created a new FieldType in the schema.xml and used it as the type of the dynamic “*_Sort”-Field. This seems to resolve our sorting-issue. Since I have never worked with solr before, I cant guarantee that this is the correct way to define the fieldType:

<fieldType name="AlphabeticalSorting" class="solr.TextField" sortMissingLast="true" omitNorms="true">
	<analyzer>
		<tokenizer class="solr.KeywordTokenizerFactory"/>
		<filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory" />
		<filter class="solr.TrimFilterFactory" />
	</analyzer>
</fieldType>

<dynamicField name="*_SORT" type="AlphabeticalSorting" indexed="true" stored="false" multiValued="false"/>

One issue I have with this solution is that if the default solr-config changes in the future, our project wont get those changes since we overwrite the solr-config. Do you think this might become an issue?

[petr-high-peak]

Hi @jonas-silver-ledge,

currently, Solr config files are in a grey zone regarding public API definition. But we try to announce all changes to these files in migration notes.

There is a change planned in 2024.06 regarding solr config, so you should transfer your sort configuration then. But I don’t expect too big a migration effort in the future. Ad we even plan replacement of the Solr in the future, so then it will be no issue either.