Sorting strangeness

[Paul Dupuis]

Good to know. Thank you.

On 9/18/2019 11:03 AM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
> On 2019-09-18 15:43, Paul Dupuis via use-livecode wrote:
>> Again, thank you Mark - this helped immensely.
>>
>> In making a commercial text analytics application, we do a lot of
>> sorting of user entered textual data. With the move from LC6.7.11 to
>> LC9.0.5rc1 we discovered the sort text issue bug, but them we many
>> dozens of sort statements through out our code, we wanted to be sure
>> switching all text sorts to international was the right way to go. All
>> are for user facing data. The alternative was to abstract them to a
>> new function that used any of the work-arounds you identified for the
>> sort text issue.
>
> If you are updating to use sort international (which sounds like the 
> correct
> thing to do in this case) then I'd still recommend abstracting to a 
> command
> handler which does the sorting (which will have no measurable impact on
> performance). e.g.
>
>   command sortTextListForUserDisplay @xList, pDirection
>     switch pDirection
>     case "ascending"
>       sort xList international ascending
>       break
>     case "descending"
>       sort xList international descending
>       break
>     end switch
>   end sortTextListForUserDisplay
>
> The reason here is that it means it gives you more control in the 
> future. Whilst
> it didn't make it into 9.5, we have been working on more general 
> 'collation'
> support which allows you to choose (with a high degree of flexibility) 
> how sorting
> occurs. So if you abstract now, then it makes it easier to change 
> things in the
> future should you want to.
>
> Warmest Regards,
>
> Mark.
>
> P.S. Indeed you might find that not all your 'sort text' instances are 
> suitable
> for sort international when you go through - so abstracting those with 
> a similarly
> richly named handler might also help code documentation as much as 
> anything else.
>