Sort by Version

1

Hi Community,
Imagine a Table with a column called “order” with rows like:
1
1.1
1.1.1
1.2.1
2.1.1.1.1
…
depending on the context, some rows might have more dots than others.
Does any one know a clever way to sort it without building tons of helper columns?
Thanks in advance.

2

For sure!

Heres an easy way to do it using Regex

image
image1636×1428 120 KB

Regex can be an intimidating formula, but is honestly one of the most useful Coda formulas you can have in your toolbelt. Heres some thorough documentation on how to use the different Coda Regex formulas!

3

Thanks for the answer Scott.
I think I was not very clear. I actually want to sort rows by the hierarchy of the version. This means, for example, that a row version 2.2.2 would be higher than 2.1.1.1.1, because the hierarchy is left to right.
In your example, if I use the results to sort the rows, it would put 2.1.1.1.1 in a higher position than 2.2.2, which is not what I intend to do.

4

Aahhhh

So it would be

1.2
1.1
2.3
2.2
2.1
3.1

Correct?

5

Hi @Scott_Collier-Weir,

I think what @Felipe_Griebel means is that using your method would result in numbers still out of order.

For example 2.2.2 becomes 222 and 2.1.1.1.1 becomes 21,111.

Number order would still be the way to go. I think the best solution would be adding zero’s so that they are all 5 to 6 digits.

Then the sort would be
10000
11000
11100
12100
12400
13100
21111
22200

Hope that makes sense.

Dale

6

I have found a solution!
Thank you for your time.

What Dale described is knows as zero-padding sort and is a common practice among back-end developers. I am not a dev, so I was having a bit of trouble implementing it in Coda tables, but now I did it.

My main purpose was to organize parent-child like structures so the views would have a coherent visual output.

like this from → to

image
image777×783 111 KB

Or this from → to

image
image771×560 35.5 KB

Here is the shared solution

Thanks

7

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8

Holy hell, I missed this. The zero pad sorting is a clever way but redundant.

Coda can actually sort on lists, i.e. a

List(
  List(1, 2),
  List(1, 1, 2)
).Sort()

will be properly reordered.

So the easiest solution is to make a column with a formula of
Version.Split(".").ForEach(CurrentValue.ToNumber())
and just sort on that.

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