Hi Fellow Gliders,
A few weeks ago, I asked something here and now I need your help/advice again.
I have built a Glide App for keeping track of the Scale Models that I have and have built.
Now I want to modify the app a little bit.
It is a Glide classic.
Right now, I have a sorted order for showing the models as, “Work in Progress”, “Done”, Ïnventory", “Ordered”, and a wishlist.
This works great.
But now I was thinking of maybe also sorting the models I have in my inventory.
Sort them by order in which I think I will build them.
I was thinking of adding another column in my table. Something like Build_Order and number them from 1 upwards. And maybe keep the number 99 as something that will be built later. (When this will be built is not known yet)
But that means also, that my sorting order for all the other groups (like Work in progress, Done, etc) also will be affected.
Any thoughts on this?
And how about, if a model is moved from “Inventory” to “Work in Progress”?
Then the order of all the models need to be changed also?
If this is getting too complicated, then maybe I will leave it the way it is now.
Many thanks in advance for all your thoughts and tips 
If you need to sort by 2+ fields, it’s best to convert every field to a number (e.g. with an If-Then-Else column) and then concatenate all the numbers in an order you prefer. You can also use a math column to create a final sorting number. Use that number to sort the collection.
You could try the following to display you collection of models, group them by status, sort the status in ascending order and then sort the models in ascending order (inside each status group).
In the Data Editor:
- You have 2 tables. One for the models (things). One for the status (categories).
- In the Status table, create a Status Sort basic number column where you can house the order of “Work in progress”, “Done”, “Inventory”, “Ordered” and “Wishlist”. Populate numbers, starting with 1 in ascending order.
- In the Models table, also create a Model Sort basic number column. Populate numbers, starting with 1 in ascending order.
- In the Models table, create a relation to the Status table and pull in the Status Sort data.
- Now in the Models table, you should have a column that indicates how models are to be sorted and how the statuses are to be sorted. These two sorts are unrelated and meant to be so.
- In the Models table, create a math computed column you can call DisplaySort with the following formula: -X-1/(Y+1) where X is StatusSort and Y is ModelSort.
In the Layout Editor:
- Sort the collection of models where Display is ascending.
- Group the collection by Status
That should do it.
Remarks:
- In the form screen when you add a status or model, ideally you would pass along a screen value so each new item would inherit the table’s row count plus one (row ID column, lookup of row IDs, roll up with count).
- I think the method above would scale nicely: each subsequent new item will be added to the bottom of the list, there is no need to reorder.
- StatusSort can be changed independent of ModelSort, which is nice I think.
- To change ModelSort, that would be another setup with increment action on buttons. To be honest this is where I feel the approach above breaks. I cannot think of an elegant and simple way to set this up in the layout editor, my limitation.
- I’m not too happy with the formula above, it feels lopsided.
My apologies if this explanation looks complicated. It’s not all that complicated, just wordy.
Hopefully someone can chime in and share another approach to sorting things, sorting and grouping categories, and changing the sort of things easily.
This sounds to me like a case Kanban should be used rather than sorting it.