Sort cards doesn't work in 7.0 -- troubleshooting bears fruit

[Timothy Miller]

On Oct 25, 2014, at 11:31 AM, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:

> I'm with Richard on this - I've never tried to sort cards numeric, and
> I'm not even sure what I would expect if I tried it. What does or
> doesn't work now, and what was the result previously? Does/did that
> sort numerically on the names of the cards or the numbers of the
> cards? Or something else?

On Oct 25, 2014, at 11:17 AM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:

> Hard to say.  I tend to externalize my data, paging it in and out of controls in a single card, so I'd never come across this in my own testing.

HyperCard retread that I am, I don’t even know what it means to page data in and out of controls. This stack was born in HyperCard and still very much resembles a stack of index cards.  You can tell, because I still type “bg field” This approach works perfectly and does everything I need it to do.

Card 1 of this stack is an index card. A pair of buttons appear on the card 1, along with other stuff. “Sort cards by name” and “Sort cards by intake date.” Their function is obvious. I just realized than neither sort command works.

 sort cards numeric by field  “intakeSecs"

-and-

 sort cards text by bg field "patient name”

Fields “intakeSecs" and “patient name” appear on every card in the stack, except card 1, where these buttons are located.

IIRC, in ancient versions of hyperCard, this kind of sort didn’t work right if the script encountered a card where the field containing the sort key was absent. Apparently this anti-feature has returned to 7.0.

If I copy the buttons and paste then onto card 2, where both fields appear, the scripts work normally. So, I guess I’ve got my workaround, and if this is indeed a bug, as I suspect it is, I would appreciate it if someone would report it on my behalf.

Thanks for your help.

Tim Miller