[Tellico-users] Re: two patches for sorting

[Robby Stephenson]

Hi Andrew,

On Sunday 21 November 2010, Andrew Bennett wrote:
> I've noticed two minor issues when sorting numbers.  I've created
> patches for both of them, although there are probably better ways of
> fixing them.

Cool, thanks for taking the time and effort to do so!

> The first, and less important, is that when a number field has
> multiple values, sorting is only performed on the first value.  The
> attached file 'sortmult.diff' loops through all the values, so that,
> for example, "1; 2" will always come before "1; 3".  There's not a lot
> to this patch, although one comment in NumberComparison::compare() had
> me a little confused:
>   // by default, an empty string would get sorted before "1" because
> toFloat() turns it into "0"
>   // I want the empty strings to be at the end
> This is different from how strings get sorted, where empty strings get
> put at the beginning (because it is just a simple string compare); it
> seemed odd that numbers and strings are being treated differently.

I added some unit tests and tweaked your patch just a bit, but just 
committed it. You're right about the ordering for empty strings. I'm not 
sure why I did it that way, so I did reverse it to be consistent with 
strings.

> The second, which I'd really like to see make it into Tellico in some
> form, is that numbers are sorted in alphabetic, rather than numeric,
> order in the group view.  The attached file 'sortgroups.diff' is a bit
> more complex, and when sorting in the group view it checks the field
> type and calls the field's custom sort function for certain types
> (number, boolean, rating, date, and LCC).

I see what you mean. I think your approach works well enough. I'm going to 
poke at it a bit more myself, but I'll certainly fix that sorting in the 
group view.

> Finally, when I build for the first time, I see a whole lot of
> warnings about deprecated functions.  It could be due to my
> environment (Ubuntu 10.10, 64-bit, GNOME), and they didn't seem to
> affect anything.  I didn't pay any attention to them, but wanted to
> mention it in case you care (they disappear on subsequent builds, so
> it's pretty easy to forget about them).

There are quite a lot of compiler warnings for some of the old internal c 
libraries I use, like btparse and pilotdb. Occasionally I think about fixing 
them up, but since they're old and crusty anyways, it's not worth the effort.

If there are deprecated warnings for anything else, it'd be worth fixing. 
Sometimes, with KDE I think, there will be a warning like that just because 
I'm using a header that includes a deprecated declaration even if I never 
use it. I develop on 64-bit opensuse, so I don't know if there's anything 
different about GNOME on Ubuntu that might show more deprecation warnings, 
though.

Thanks again, and sorry for the late reply!
Robby