Automatic vs. manual ordering of selected nodes

I was talking about automatic ordering of selected nodes with jklsemicolon in another issue, see
http://drupal.org/node/173500#comment-976813

At the moment this module works so that the order of selected nodes (delta in database table) is the same as the order they are moved to "selected" box. E.g. if nodes are selected in order A, C and B their deltas are set in this same order and the node references end up showing in this same order.

This functionality is, of course, logical. Usability wise it is not quite complete because if the user wants to change the order later he/she must first unselect all nodes and then re-select them in the desired order. This is possible to do when the number of selected nodes is relatively small but I guess the users of this module tend to have a reason of using this module (read: many, many references).

jklsemicolon wrote in the issue mentioned above that move up/down buttons are in the todo list of this module. This would, of course solve the usability problem described above.

I personally don't mind if this move up/down functionality would be implemented (I don't need it, though) but I would like to point out another usability improvement.

I have a node type club that has a nodereferences to nodes of type player. A club can have hundreds of references to players so this module really makes life easier when maintaining the list of players.

However, when new players are referenced, they are appended to the end of the list. This makes it quite difficult to maintain the list especially when the user wants to remove a player from the club. The players may or may not be in a logical order depending on the order of which they were selected.

I previously (see the issue mentioned above) suggested that this module would automatically sort alphabetically the selected nodes. Because the current functionality makes it possible to manually order the selected nodes (even though it's difficult) this is clearly not a very good idea.

I'll finally get to my point and the new feature request. It would be very nice to have an option for automatic alphabetical sorting.

Because one Drupal site can have many different uses for this module it might not be the best idea to put this option to a global variable; it could be very needed in one place but in another place the manual move up/down ordering might be the way to go (if it gets implemented one day). Because of this I suggest there could be a checkbox in the node edit form, right below the unselected and selected boxes. See the attached mockup to get the point.

-Markus