Submitted by jimspoon on 2015/12/29 18:32
I have an item with many subitems, manually arranged in a specific order, and was later dismayed to find that they had been sorted in alphabetical order.
 
Not sure how this happened.  The grid is set to sort items in ascending alphabetical order by the contents of the Item field.  The Item column header has the upward arrow.  The sort box is empty, but the sort box button settings are "Sort On" and "Sort Items", not "Sort Items and Subitems".
 
Anyway, is there a way to lock the sorting of an item's subitems, so that the manual ordering will not be affected by any global sorting setting?
 
On a somewhat different question - I would like to be able to open an item in a Scratch grid (perhaps after I have found it in using Quick Search (binoculars)), and then have the subitems displayed in the same manual ordering I created in the grid in which I entered them.  I remember opening an item in a scratch grid and finding that the ordering of subitems was not as I had entered them in the entry grid.
 
 

Comments

Haven't used this but should work -- from Undo Sort By Name?[quote=Pierre_Admin]
currently, it is not possible to undo sort.
 
What you can do however is, before sorting, use the Edit > Renumber items to fill a "order" column.
When you want to retrun to your manual sort, you simply sort on this column
If you create more than 1 sort column, you can toggle between sorts.
 
Another possibility is to hoist your subitems, ensure that context parents are not shown and then sort that list[/quote]

jimspoon

2015/12/30 03:22

Permalink

Thanks for this helpful tip.
 
Things I observed.
 
- the Renumber Items function was greyed out until I selected a number of items.
- When I selected a number of items (a number of cells in the Item column) using Shift+down, the option became available.
- When I selected Renumber Items, consecutive numbers were placed in the Item fields of the consecutive items.  The numbers will replace the existing contents of the field, so make sure you've selected cells in the column (field) where you want the numbers to go, and not where you have text you want to retain.
- I created a ManualOrder field to hold the item numbers instead of the Item field.
- The numbering is consecutive regardless of the hierarchy of the items being numbered.  So, if you have eight consecutive items, but they are arranged in a hierarchy, some being parents to some of the others, they will be numbered 1-8 regardless of the hierarchy.  So, if a parent item is numbered 3, its first child item will be numbered 4, and not 1.
- If I collapse the parent item (hide the child items) - and then highlight the "ManualOrder" field cells for the parent items, numbers are inserted only for the parent items, not the hidden subitems.
 
So ... I'd still like to see an "order locking" feature, but the Renumber Items function can be used to accomplish the preserve or restore the desired order, with some work and observance of the behaviors mentioned above.
 
 

IQ can handle hierarchies that are fixed or dynamic. e.g. :
  • Fixed hierarchies: outline of a book
  • Dynamic hierarchies: tasks and sub-tasks
 
How grids behave regarding this is set by the Grid > Sort Bar and Grid > Source Bar > Sort box settings.
  • Fixed hierarchies: Hide the Sort Bar and turn off the Grid sort box. In this mode, you can drag-drop to re-arrange both items and sub-items
  • Fixed sub-items: Hide the Sort Bar and turn on the Grid sort box > Sort Items. Set the sorting criteria for TLI
  • Dynamic hierarchies:
    • Method 1:Show the Sort Bar. In this mode clicking on a column header will sort based on values in this column. You can also drag column header to the sort bar to sort on multiple columns
    • Method 2: Hide the Sort Bar and turn on the Grid sort box > Sort Items and Sub-items. Set the sorting criteria for both all items (TLI and subs)
HTH !
 
Pierre_Admin