Sorting by Date-and-Time columns does not change the order - only reverts to original order about obsidian-sortable

[alexandru-dinu]

down the line it would be nice for the sorting to “just work”

I fully agree -- minimal tinkering on user's part!

I will research more into how Wikipedia achieves this, since it's the main source of inspiration for the plugin.

I appreciate the feedback and I am glad that people find Sortable useful!

[alexandru-dinu]

Yes, sorry for the misunderstanding, column annotation was just an idea.

[claremacrae]

Yes, down the line it would be nice for the sorting to “just work” but I totally realise the nature of maintaining open-source projects and not everything can be done - I’ve been there myself on C++ projects…

For now, this is already really useful.

[alexandru-dinu]

Hello,

Thank you for the thorough report!

Currently, as mentioned in the project's README, the plugin supports sorting numerical and string data types. Custom comparator functions are part of the roadmap.

I will look into it and try add support for sorting date-time in the nearest future.

Best,
Alex

[claremacrae]

Thanks for the swift reply. It's certainly not urgent to fix.

I must admit that bit of the README hadn't sunk in, but I might have assumed that there were numerical values. I take your point, though, that they are not.

In the meantime, might it be feasible to fall-back on treating other data types as strings, and sorting their unmodified string representation? This would give the desired value in this, and I suspect many other cases.

[alexandru-dinu]

I believe that's a fair point. There are certainly lots of edge cases (e.g. time zones, currencies etc.), but it's a good step forward.

For the meantime, I'd let let the user specify their preferred datetime format string in the settings and try to parse with that.

Maybe even annotate table's column with the data type?

[claremacrae]

Thanks. How would I do that annotation please? (My tables are generated by dataview)

[alexandru-dinu]

Right, it may be trickier in this case -- there's #6 on the roadmap as well.

[claremacrae]

Oh sorry, I thought you were mentioning an existing feature, maybe I misunderstand. Not to worry.

Thanks for the replies anyway, and thanks again for the useful plugin.

[alexandru-dinu]

To summarize:

At the time of writing, Sortable can only sort numeric and string data types. In your example, all the values from the Dates column get parsed as numbers, i.e. 2021, so the order does not change.

Supporting other data types is tracked in #18.

For the immediate future, I will allow the user to specify a date-time format string in plugin's settings and use that to try to parse date-time values.

Again, thank you for reporting. Closing this, as the main issue for this bug will be #18.