Managing the Sort Direction Indicator
for a Headed List Field

I often see questions from developers, including seasoned ones, about the use of the Sort Direction Indicator in the column header of a Headed List field. Many seem to think that it should just work automatically, while others recognize that this would be impossible, but still are at a loss to get it to work satisfactorily. That is because there are a few pieces to the puzzle that we must provide in our code.

My purpose in writing this Monograph is to first explain why Omnis Studio cannot possibly manage this feature for us automatically (and why this is a good thing) and then go on to explain both how to use the feature in its simplest form as well as how to decide to use any of a number of possible variations and extensions of the basic principle. This is not simply a set of code snippets to be copied from the example library to your own. It is hoped that the explanation and discussion will help inspire you to create more interesting and useful application interfaces involving this feature.

This Monograph required 11 pages (with no illustrations, but some code listings and tables) for the explanations. It is in pdf format and is written as a US letter sized document with two columns per page for better readability. Some future Monographs may require more or fewer pages, but I intend to present a reasonably thorough treatment of each technique.

There are also an example library and datafile that accompany the pdf file. These were written using Omnis Studio 4.0.3. A version 4.1 file will be distributed to all early purchasers of the Monograph because I also mentioned a useful new feature that appears in Omnis Studio 4.1, which isn't even mentioned in the What's New document for the beta version, so many 4.1 beta testers may not even know it exists!

You never know what you might learn in these documents...

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