Ability to specify a defaultSort on a collection by collection basis

[jmikrut]

We should expose a property to allow developers to specify a default sort property for each collection, which will be used instead of the built-in Payload default of -createdAt.

[wrobson-lllow]

Is this referring to the property "defaultSort" on the Collection Config? If so it appears to only accept a name of a field and an optional "-" flag. It would be much more useful if it could also accept a function. For example I'm currently trying to sort a collection of version tags semantically i.e. ["0.0.1", "0.0.2", "0.0.3", ...., "0.0.10", "0.0.11"] but defaultSort is sorting them as ["0.0.1", "0.0.10", "0.0.11", "0.0.2", "0.0.3", etc.]

[DanRibbens]

There might be a way to customize the sort in MongoDB, but it probably requires a custom aggregation.

A workaround in Payload would be to add beforeChange and afterRead hooks on your version field to store it in a format that sorts how you expect, while appearing as a semantic version.

For this to work you would just split the string on the '.'.
Add 1 to the number (so that 0 can be handled correctly).
Multiply by 1000 so that something like '0.0.90' is less than '0.1.0'

For example:
Input/output => stored as
'0.11.1' => '1000120002000',
'0.2.1' => '100030002000',

Now when sorted, the DB will be handling it correctly because 1000120002000 > 100030002000

The afterRead just needs to undo this conversion to appear correct.

You could store this calculated version to sort on field in a computed field that is hidden from the admin and populate it from the user input version field.

I'd like to see us add a feature to specificy the sort order for hasMany relationships.

What do you think @wrobson-lllow?

[wrobson-lllow]

@DanRibbens this looks like it will work well. I'll be sure to give you any updates.

[wrobson-lllow]

@DanRibbens Creating a hidden "number" field that is set the Number conversion you outlined above on a beforeValidate hook has worked for sorting the tags semantically in the collection. However, I have a global that has a relationship field relating to the tags, where the tags still appear out of order. Is there anyway I can make a relationship field sort the same as the collection to which it is relating.

[DanRibbens]

The order should be preserved after retrieval if you store it in the preffered order.

You could sort the incoming related items on a beforeChange field hook. You'll have to use the local api to look them up before returning the ids in the proper order based on the hidden number field you made.

[wrobson-lllow]

@DanRibbens I'm still having trouble getting the records to display in the correct order in a relationship field. The order does not seem to be preserved even after re-seeding the database. Could you give me a little more detail on how to sort the incoming data via the beforeChange field hook?