Sorting by Custom Field Type

[nicholas2]

Hi All,

I’ve had a good look through the forums to see if anyone else is having this issue and either its not there or I don’t know how to phrase the search correctly.

I’m building an App to track materials and I’m trying to do a simple sort based on the material type then the thickness.

I have a “Material Types” data type with a list of types of materials:

Then a list of materials with material types as one of the “fields”.

All I want to do is run a repeating group to list out the materials and be sorted by MaterialType first then MaterialThickness.

The option to “Sort by” under the “Search for” doesn’t list the MaterialType as an option and I’m assuming this is because its a custom field type.

Is there a way to achieve this that I’m not seeing?

Thanks

[williamtisdale]

I don’t think you can sort a data type by a field that is an option set. We had this issue as well. We had an option set called Team Role which had options like Manager and Assistant Manager and each option had a rank, like Manager was 5 and Assistant Manager was 4. Then when we tried to sort the list of users by their Team Role we could not. The workaround we came up with was to give each User a field called rank and whenever a user was given a Team Role we assigned their rank to the Team Role’s Rank. Then we were able to sort them by rank. I’m assuming you want them sorted alphabetically, so maybe just give them a field that is a text and also assign the options display there to sort by or instead of making Material Type a custom option set just switch it to text and save the options Display there. If the Field Material Type has to be the custom option, then creating the secondary ‘useless but necessary to sort’ field will work for what you need.