I'm having a problem that I cannot seem to fi...

[H1_Unlimited]

I’m having a problem that I cannot seem to find an easy answer to: We have multiple “heats” of racing (Qualifying, Heat 1A, Heat 1B, Heat 2A, Heat 2B, Heat

Heat 3A, Heat 3B, Final Heat) with multiple drivers in each.

I have a table view that is grouped by heats, then by result in that heat, which does exactly what it supposed to do. So far, so good.

The problem comes in sort order in the Table View: it sorts by alphabetical order (Final, Heat 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, Qualifying), which is not the chronological order.

I have added another column (heat order), giving each heat a number, so Qualifying is 1, Heat 1A is 2, Heat 1B is 3, etc., but I CANNOT get the table to sort by that “Heat Order” field, no matter what I do! It will ALWAYS sort alphabetically!

Any ideas of what I’m doing wrong?

[Jacob_Lin_AppSh]

I’m going to assume that your rows are already in the right order in your spreadsheet here.

Go to UX -> [Your Table View] -> Sort by. If there isn’t a rule there already, click + to create one. Modify the rule to sort _RowNumber Ascending.

This way, you don’t need

your ‘Heat Order’ column anymore, if the rows are in the right order already. Otherwise, you can just sort by ‘Heat Order’ there.

If this doesn’t work, let me know.

[H1_Unlimited]

Tried that and no luck - nothing changes. It’s really strange too, because I have another sheet that lists the videos of the same heats and that view sorts properly.

Here’s the Excel sheet:

[H1_Unlimited]

Here’s the UX view settings:

[H1_Unlimited]

The app is “H1 Unlimited” in App Store and Google Play.

[Jacob_Lin_AppSh]

Oh, it seems that I misunderstood your problem. What you’re essentially trying to do is sort the groupings (Qualifying, Heat 1, etc).

This is unfortunately not possible. Just the logic behind it is not feasible if we were to allow it for all use cases.

The only solution I can give you is to rename your ‘groups’ so that they

will display in correct order when alphabetical. To do this, you could add a numeric value to each heat name so that their groups would be in order ( e.g. ‘1. Qualifier’, ‘2. Heat 1’, etc).

[H1_Unlimited]

@Jacob_Lin_AppSheet Thanks for taking a look at this, but I was afraid of that result.

It would be fantastic if you could investigate adding another control to allow that type of sort, as I would think there would be many other cases where the user would not want the groups to be sorted in alphabetical order (placings, dates, totals, etc.).

[Jacob_Lin_AppSh]

As I said before, it is impossible to automatically sort the groups by a column’s values. Think about it. How would you logically sort the group by a column whose values could be different for every individual group’s members? Your case is special but from our side it’s not possible to implement for all cases.

The only way to make this work is to do it in the UX editor, with a drag n drop group name ordering or something like that.

Placings, dates, and totals are all numbers and as such they’ll sort correctly ascending or descending unless if the user wants some an arbitrary sort value. The groupings should work for that.

Sorry that it’s not possible to sort groups manually like this right now, but if you really want something like that you could go to appsheet.com - Login - AppSheet and put in a request there. It would be a difficult thing to implement but not impossible, I guess. Login - AppSheet appsheet.com