Sorting property lists
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From: Darrel Hoffman on 16 Apr 2008 00:22 > What do you do with it once it's sorted? Can you just display the data in > the sorted order but leave it as is in the list? Yes, as a matter of fact, the original list must remain unsorted. (Entries must stay in the order they're added for cross-referencing purposes.) What I've been doing is copying the master-list to a new list for sort-and-display purposes. The display list also has a variety of filtering options to only display some of the master-list items by type. But my method for generating the display list copies entire records as a whole, rather than building each record item by item, so I have little say over which order the properties end up in. (Copying the records item by item takes about 5 times as long, processor-wise, I've found. While there's a slight delay when generating and sorting the filtered lists, it's still within the acceptable range. The delay caused by trying to do them item by item is far too long to be acceptable. I'm not sure if interfacing with a database would be better or not, but it sounds like that's just getting overly complex for this purpose. I may have to look into DB management for other reasons, though, so it's not out of the question. I'm just surprised that there isn't an option within the program to do something like this, like: propList.sort(#name) That would be a really elegant way to handle it - if only, if only... Oh well.
From: UdoGre on 16 Apr 2008 02:40
Hi Darrel, One other option might be to create several property lists that reference to your master list, one for every property in your master list. Depending on the size of your list, it might be fast enough. DB sound good too, though. Udo |