More efficient mechanism for sorting in the UX

TristanS

One of the most common requests I get from clients is to sort a grid by list descriptions against them (e.g. product description, customer name). The request for sorting is against non system modules (input, calculation or output modules), so in order to sort these in the UX I would need create a text line item in the module to reference the names from the system module.

 

The issue I have with this is that text line items take up more space in models and space is gold for modelling and is slower to process. 

 

So have the following options: 

1. Enable ranking of a text line item. This can be performed in the system module. Then only line item you would need to copy across to the module that requires sorting in the display would be numeric line item which would consume less space.

2. Provide the functionality to sort a module based on the value from another module (system module). E.g. you need to display an input module sorted alphabetically by the product list name but you can sort based on the description value in the system module for product