Hey @dtm2023, first, I want to remind you that Repeating Groups are just a display mechanism for lists (by which we mean, some list expression). The RG is not the list, it is merely a display element for the list expression you’ve constructed in the “Data source” field here:
… or when you force a new list to be displayed via Display List:
Of course, Repeating Groups have an exposed state which allows you to refer to the current contents of the RG somewhere else (as That Repeating Group's List of Whatevers). This is similar to if you were storing the result of some list expression in a custom state, or in some other element (like List Shifter or Floppy Expression Watcher) that takes some input list expression and exposes that list at some other exposed state (which I usually refer to as an “output”).
So you’ve apparently got five list expressions. I suppose these are the outputs of five different Transform List elements? And then perhaps you’re sorting each list by geographic distance?
So you’ve got TL 1 :sorted, TL 2: sorted, etc.
In vanilla Bubble, the “concatenation” operator is merged with, which is one of those operators that operates set-wise (it removes duplicates). However, in this case that wouldn’t seem to be an issue.
Anyway, when you merge two lists (e.g., List A merged with List B) that have defined sorting, the resulting list preserves the order of items in each list as far as I can tell. And the result is [First Item from A, ..., Last Item from A, First Item from B, ... Last Item from B].
So there’s a lot of different ways you can accomplish merging the five lists. If you turn on parentheses (Settings > Versions > Experimental > Expression parentheses) you can just write this merge as an expression (and you’ll see in my previous screenshot there’s an example of this) and it’ll look something like:
(TL1 :sorted) merged with (TL2 :sorted) merged with (TL3 :sorted) merged with (TL4 :sorted) merged with (TL5 :sorted)
And unless you further modify that expression, the order of things should be preserved.
If for some reason it isn’t, what you could do is use List Shifter’s SET Custom List action. The “Custom List” is like a custom state (it only updates when you tell it to via the SET action) but it preserves duplicates and the SET action has a concatenate option. Like so:
When the concatenate option is set, what happens is that the new Custom List value is
appended to the current Custom List value, so you’d do this as 5 actions, appending the list expressions in order. List Shifter’s Custom List output then contains the results of the concatenation (note that you have to set “publish custom list” to yes for the values to appear there – this lets you do things like multiple concatenations in a row and then, only at the end, expose the new value).
(To use the Custom List or Process List features of List Shifter, you have to tell List Shifter the type of the list you’re going to construct, and that’s done in the main List Shifter interface, under PROCESS Output Type:
