I'm in the appian designer and I'm trying to sort my datasets by description.
Normally if you use an underscore "_" as the first character, entries with the "_" as its first character will appear at the top of the list when sorting alphabetically.
Not with Appian however
Anything with an "_" as its first character sorts to the bottom of the list, not the top.
Example
Any NameBny NameCny Name_ny Name
Why? No one else seems to do it this way. I've worked with dozen of applications and none of them sort the "_" character last like this.
Is this a bug or is Appian taking a page from MS' playbook and assumes that it knows better than everyone how sorting should work?
How can I fix this or find a work around? I don't want to resort to using 1, 2, 3... in order to force my descriptions to sort properly.
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Interesting...can you show how you're attempting to conduct your sorting? I've just tried this (see sample code below) and it works as you describe it should:
a!localVariables( local!list: { a!map(value: "Any Name"), a!map(value: "Bny Name"), a!map(value: "Cny Name"), a!map(value: "_ny Name") }, fn!todatasubset( arrayToPage: local!list, pagingConfiguration: a!pagingInfo( startIndex: 1, batchSize: -1, sort: a!sortInfo( field: "value", ascending: true ) ) ) )
I assume it kinda depends on what he meant by "sort my datasets by description" in the OP - but I'm not sure what "data sets" it involves, or what "description" -- is this querying on a DB field? Sorting appian objects by their literal "description" field? Something else? I'm pretty unclear.