Allow sorting for any field on any entity

I've been thinking... and maybe we can use the field API to our advantage in this case.

What if we have a "checkbox" that says "Natural Sort this Field". If it is checked then Another field is created that is the natural sort version of the field in question. Then I would have to have a views handler at all. It would mearly be using View's built in capabilities and having the user select to sort by that field. That "may" make the custom word list easier because then you might be able to do it per field, using hook_field_update and hook_field_insert to modify my new field. In addition, this field could be subject to anything you want to do to it including display and editing which brings up all kinds of other features.

This sounds like a pretty good size rework of how things are done now.

I'm actually working on this right now. Thanks for the support.

It looks like this update is only going to be limited to fields and nodes to start with. I'm finding it difficult to come up with an inclusive way to throw ALL entities and their text data structures into this while mapping them to existing views fields. This is already going to be a problem with modules that make copies of fields for purposes like throwing a different handler on. I think this would be an acceptable limitation though. Either make that module support me... or if it's asked for enough... I can add it in mine with an conditional looking for their module.

Not sure who all wants to take a look see, but you can follow my progress in the 7.x-2.x branch. What I've managed so far is to get a sort going for Node title and all text fields that have a limit to their size ("varchar" for the techies). By default, fields doesn't let you sort anything other than varchar, numeric, and date fields.

I've had to add a few fields to the database. One I haven't added yet but need to is a delta field for those fields that have carnality greater than 1.

Another interesting issue I've come across is that if you sort a field with carnality greater than 1 you will always get "duplicates" due to the way the query works. This really isn't a bug, though you will find it here in the views issue queue, so it's not specific to my module.

With that said, something I plan to do eventually is see if I can add an option to the "Multiple field settings" under the field handler that will allow you to naturally sort them when you display all values in the same row.

The next steps are to add a configuration section for the fields that you want to allow Natural Sorting on. It would be a shame and a big waste of database space to needlessly store all varchar fields in the views_natural_sort table. So the plan is to let you say which ones are allowed to be sorted and what you want to replace in each one (A, An, The type things). This will probably be on a "field instance" basis.

One last thing... I don't think I'm going to be able to supply an upgrade path for the views already out there... This means you will have to recreate your view when you upgrade to 2.x. That will be something I tackle later. I put myself at about a 1/3 of the way done.

Another update for those who are following...

I've decided that the fields part of the code should be a "seperate module". With that said, the module will be downloaded with views_natural_sort kinda like views and views_ui are packaged together. I did this because I don't know exactly how much of a performance hit storing field data into the database will be and then pulling it out later. But with that said, it will only be a click away in the modules configuration section.

Another reason I thought to do this is because it makes my code a heck of a lot cleaner. There are going to be special form alters that are going to be added just for the field configuration and what not so I didn't want to muk up the who module with that stuff... plus fields technically have their own special sort handler because the one I use for node titles wasn't up to the task.

Next, I've been debating on a dependency for the field portion, and instead of making everyone download that dependency, it would only make those who want to use the field portion download it.

This has been some enlightening stuff as well as a big PITA dealing with both views and field API, but I'm getting closer, I would say probably a little over halfway done. Also I've made some awesome abstraction improvements that makes the code a little more complicated, but easier to develop on as a whole.

Lastly, I'm adding some hooks and what not so that you can develop modules that will naturally sort more than just node titles and text fields of type varchar. In addition this this... you will also be able to control the "transformations" that cause the text to sort so specifically. For instance, in #546794 we added the ability to sort numeric data naturally. You may not want this, so you can choose to remove that transformation, and even add your own to the queue as well as conditionally cause a transformation to happen. This is for those developers out there that are using this module for some very special purpose and will be my framework for adding new transformations later.

Note: a transformation is something like removing specific words from the beginning of the string. See below:

<?php
function views_natural_sort_remove_beginning_words($string) {
    $beginning_words = variable_get('views_natural_sort_beginning_words_remove', array());
    if (empty($beginning_words)) {
      return $string;
    }
  
    array_walk($beginning_words, 'preg_quote');
    return preg_replace(
      '/^(' . implode('|', $beginning_words) . ')\s+/i',
      '',
      $string
    );
}
?>

Ladies & Gents,

I give you the release of Views Natural Sort 2.0 ALPHA. I'm not 100% sure about it's stability yet and would love it if a few of you would test it and see how it goes.

There is only an upgrade path for the views_natural_sort index table at the moment. All views must be recreated that used the old field handler as I changed the way that all worked.

Speaking of that, if you want to learn how to use the new module (I'll be adding some usability things soon), check out the quickly put together documentation.

Please feel free to bombard me with issues you find.

Speaking of that, you will need the devel module on for bits of this as I forgot and left some dvms in there. My bad!

@vegardjo
looks like you found a bug. Regular "Text" fields (Not Long Text) should already be Naturally sortable. I just went through on simplytest.me and found this out for myself. Give me a couple of days to debug unless someone wants to donate time.

I moved this issue over to #2168661: Views Natural Sort is not sorting Text Fields

@Andre-b lets make this 2 separate issues. One for the time out and one for the warning.

@everyone as for progress on making this work for all entities I made some progress but nothing releasable. This is going to take me looking at entities schema info and matching them with views info. After that I will have to manage fields. Looking good though.

keep you up to date.