Permanently sorting orders in a particular order (such as 'by date')

[MrsBee]

Hi there,

I am just wondering whether anybody knows a way to permanently retain a particular sort order for the customer orders which are displayed, once you have sorted them in the way that you want them by clicking on the title of the column?

Way back (I think version 9 possibly) you could permanently put the customer orders in a particular order by clicking on the title of the column (in my case, the date column - ascending or descending as preferred) and then Actinic would always remember your preference for ever and you never had to sort the columns again.

Since version 10, and now again in version 11, I have to set my desired sort order every time I go into one of my three sites. I know it's only a click to set it (well, two actually - if I click the date column it sorts in ascending, and I then have to click again to make it descending) but it's soooo annoying when I know that this worked a while back!

Actually, I noticed yesterday that in version 11 once you have downloaded your orders, it now chucks the list back at you in any kind of order. I'm not sure what column it's using to sort - whereas before, at least it always sorted my orders using my preferred 'date' column, albeit ascending instead of descending but now, after downloading orders, it spits the orders back at me in goodness knows what kind of order, but I know it's not the date column it's sorting on and that has just annoyed me even more

Does anybody have any ideas as to how the sort order can be retained permanently? This might only be of little or no annoyance to some, but it drives me mad knowing it used to work! Many thanks

[Foyowa]

That is one thing that annoys me as well

[brucet]

Another issue raised is that new orders always go to the bottom of the list, which is inconvenient if you have a large number of orders. I would like to get this fixed at the same time.

The fix is easy if orders are sorted by date with the newest at top. A new order should slot into the top of the list.

But say they are sorted by customer name. Where should new orders go? Should they go to the top, or should they slot into the existing order according to (in this case) the name of the customer?

[leehack]

Double sort options maybe, filter by name and then by date possible? like you get with the excel sort feature.

[Mike Hughes]

I'd assume that if orders are sorted by name then a new order should slot into it's proper position by name. The assumption would be that the user was looking for an order by name, so it makes sense that you don't hide a new order by putting it out of position.

The only time you need a secondary sort within a primary one is where you have multiple items at the same sort level/band. ie if you sort by Payment type then there are probably lots of orders with the same payment type. In this case I'd probably assume the sort order within that band should be the previous sort type.

So if I sorted by date first and then sorted by payment type, I'd expect to see items with the same payment type sorted by date.

Mike

[leehack]

With double sorting, i'm thinking more along the lines of looking for an order, where you would for example sort by date and then by name or vice versa. So Mr Jones who ordered on 8th October was easy to find amongest 150 orders on that day etc.

Agree that all new orders should be added to the list with the current selected sort method persisting.

[brucet]

I'm aiming to get both issues fixed in a v11 maintenance release.

ISTM there is one big disadvantage to dropping new orders into the currently sorted order - if you are using any of the sync options, including stock sync, you might not notice that new orders had been downloaded unless you re-sorted manually by date. This could result in orders going unnoticed for a period of time. I'm not sure that would be popular with everybody.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree Bruce. But you have to give people credit for doing things the way that makes sense for them and not try to double guess things.

If people want to see new orders on the screen when they arrive then they know the best way is just to sort by date with the most recent at the top.

The best analogy I can come up with is that if I want to spend my day looking out the kitchen window I know I'm not going to see the post come in through the front door. I know I'll have to go and look if I want to know some new post has arrived, I don't expect the postman to come around to the back garden and give me a thumbs up sign.

My general rule on things like this: Just do what's been agreed (and is therefor expected) and that way everybody's happy and there can be no confusion.

i.e. if you're going to sort by name, then sort by name. Don't go changing it.

Mike

[leehack]

I agree with Mike here 100%, the worst thing Actinic can do on settings like this is try and work out what people do or what they want. The fact is you simply do not know unless you go watch 100 different people do their day to day work. This sort of thing is a must for me where 'development' must bridge the gap into understanding the 'user' and how they work with it each day.

Does this removal of what it used to do in V9 come as part of development or is that a conscious decision that someone chooses to take away? How do things like this disappear? Or is that just part of a large development process and unavoidable?

[Paul Bulpit]

I'm aiming to get both issues fixed in a v11 maintenance release.

Fixing it in V11 doesn't help V10 users (some of whom may have signed up only shortly before V11 was released last month) or resolve the issue of why it USED to work (V9) but now doesn't.

[guccij]

I would like to see a return to the orders tab remembering how you sort your orders *however you choose to sort them*.

/ends

[leehack]

For clarity, V9 and V10 users are unlikely to get this fixed on their versions. Reason being it most likely involves change to the core code to have it fixed. This will not happen on older versions, unless it is sometimes in exceptional circumstances for say security reasons or something like that.

With Bruce commenting that this will be fixed in V11, it is safe to assume that it is not a simple registry fix or alike. If a simple registry fix surfaces as part of the fix, i am sure Actinic will look to share this info with users of previous versions.

[leehack]

Fixing it in V11 doesn't help V10 users (some of whom may have signed up only shortly before V11 was released last month) or resolve the issue of why it USED to work (V9) but now doesn't.

I am not sure on the exact timescale, sure it is about a month or so, but pretty sure Actinic give you a free upgrade to the next version if it is launched within a set time of the one you have bought. This is to stop situations like you might be experiencing, where a user might not know the approximate release dates and could feel short changed. Well worth a call to sales to clarify.

[MrsBee]

Thank you everybody for your input. The double sorting sounds like it could be handy. A related issue which I forgot to mention was the fact that if two or more customers place their orders within the same minute, and I sort the orders by date in my favourite way (most recent on top), it annoyingly puts the two orders that were placed within the same minute the other way around, ie the second order which was placed a few seconds after the first order is positioned below the first. It shouldn't do that if I have sorted all my orders to display the most recent at the top - they should be in absolute 100% order based on each order's sequence number.

So for example - if three orders are placed at 14.03pm and I sort the full list of orders with the most recent showing at the top, the sequence of those three orders will still be in the opposite order to the full list. In other words, if the last part of their order numbers are 0001, 0002 and 0003, it will list them downwards in that order (0001, 0002, 0003). Those three orders wrongly get sorted within themselves with the most recent (0003) at the bottom. Even though the three orders collectively sit in the correct position in the full list of orders, they do not sort properly amongst themselves. Do you see what I mean? Is this something that could be addressed at the same time perhaps?

On a related note, where can we report general little bugs like this? I know of quite a few minor annoyances which really should have been addressed in recent years, but haven't. Unfortunately I don't have the time to phone support about them - but in the spirit of polishing up the software I do feel that the developers should be made aware of these things and I would be quite happy to keep posting threads like this if I knew that it was the correct way to go.

[Paul Bulpit]

In addition to MrsBee's comment, Version 10 displays the time on the screen in the format [ dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:00 ], (i.e., every order is 'to the minute') even though the database does in fact record the seconds as well.

In Version 9, which DID remember how you wanted them to be sorted, the time was displayed as [ dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss ] and the order sorted was 'to the second' without problem.