Sorting AutoNumber Power Pages

[shubhambhangale]

Hello,

I want to sort the list results of Power Pages by INT value of AutoNumber field. If I understand correctly, AutoNumber in Dataverse is of string data type, so it sorts like 1, 11, 111, 2, 3... It should sort like 1, 2, 3, 11, 111..

Please assist. I don't want to use CSS as it will sort after rendering the data and hence I would need to add delay for same (which I don't want).

Thank you in advance!

[OliverRodrigues]

I would probably create a separate Number field and copy that value over (using Workflow or something), then use this field to sort the view, optionally you can hide the column via JavaScript

[shubhambhangale]

Apologies, but this is not feasible because we cannot add this field in each of the table where we need sorting(10-12 tables). Also, this would increase data redundancy and maintainability. 

[OliverRodrigues]

Not sure if you have many other options here to be honest, this is a string text, the other option would be JavaScript, however that would only look at the records on the current page. If you have a large number of records it wouldn't work.

I can't think if anything else really 😔

[Fubar]

Autonumber has the capability to pad with leading zeros, doing so will sort correctly e.g 00001,00002, 00011 etc,

I can't remember but you may need to tick/click the advanced on the autonumber definition. for a 5 digit long padded number you would do something like {SEQ:5} with your Seed value set to something less than 4 long.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/data-platform/create-auto-number-attributes?t...

[OliverRodrigues]

That's a good idea @Fubar 

if you don't like the way it looks in the portal, you can then use JS to remove the left 0's

however, in the back-end Model-Driven App you will still see the 0's to the left

[shubhambhangale]

Thank you, but this would increase the overhead of trimming those 0s in Power Pages as well as storing additional 0s in DB(which does not seem to be an optimized approach). Are you aware of any other solution? 

[Fubar]

Autonumber is always text, so either way if you want to sort you will probably carry extra overhead.  You can always use auto number and also create a whole number field and then trim the autonumber and save it in the whole number field using a realtime plugin or workflow (with a custom coded workflow activity).

You can also find third-party offerings that will generate autonumbers as integers, or you could write your own custom code, but it is not as simple as you may first think and a lot of the third-party ones can still give duplicate numbers under load (the difficulty is due to the backend comprising multiple application servers and database pools).

At the end of the day generating the autonumber with leading zeros is probably easiest and quickest, and when you account for the time you will spend either creating your own or investigating 3rd party offerings also the most cost effective.