Your use case seem very reasonable to me. In this particular case I disagree with my esteemed colleague Alex (who sits across from me)... I think our default sorting routines should handle null values. So please file this as a bug at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex and feel free to mention that I consider it a bug. However, I agree with Alex that it probably will not get fixed in time for the Flex 3 release, as the bar is currently extremely high for making changes at this point. We've got to stabilize the release and get it out! So you'll need to use a workaround for now. Gordon Smith Adobe Flex SDK Team
________________________________ From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of aceoohay Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 2:38 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Re: If Flex is open source, how do we go about changing the language? Gordon: This thread was not intended as a technical thread, which is why I didn't include the details about the problem. I documented the problem in the following post; http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/95131 <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/95131> The only responses I got seemed to indicate that the behavior was by design, as opposed to a bug. Yes, it does throw a runtime error. I just signed up over at the Adobe bugs site. Paul --- In flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> , "Gordon Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > it gets confused when there are nulls in date, numeric, or boolean > fields > > > this is by design > > I doubt that we designed this code to intentionally get confused. : ) It > sounds like we're simply not properly handling null field values when > sorting. > > What do you mean by "get confused"? Does it throw an RTE? Do the nulls > cause incorrect sorting of the non-null values? Do the nulls not sort > together? How kind of sorting behavior do you think should occur when > there are null values? Should they sort before or after other values? > Please file the bug at htp://bugs.adobe.com/flex. <htp://bugs.adobe.com/flex.> > > BTW, the Flex SDK is not yet open-source, but it will be soon. > > Gordon Smith > Adobe Flex SDK Team > > ________________________________ > > From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> ] On > Behalf Of aceoohay > Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 9:33 PM > To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> > Subject: [flexcoders] If Flex is open source, how do we go about > changing the language? > > > > I just ran across what I consider a significant deficiency in Flex. > To correct this problem would require an addition of two attributes > to the mx:DataGridColumn class. > > I could make a change to my version of the language, or perhaps I > could create an inherited class. However, I feel strongly that the > problem is so fundamental that it should be changed in the language. > How do I go about making this happen? > > The problem is this; > > It appears that when sorting a DataGrid by clicking a column that > Flex currently does its best to determine the data type and sorts > based on that data type. The problem is that it gets confused when > there are nulls in date, numeric, or boolean fields. When it gets > confused it ralph's on its shoes (blows up). Based on my research, > including reading a bit of the file sortField.as, this is by design. > > There is a way around it but it requires instantiating a compare > function for each column that might get a null, and might be one of > non string data types. The workaround is to create a function, and > use the "sortCompareFunction" attribute to call a that function. > There is even a kludgier workaround to make the function generic by > using the "headerRelease" attribute of the DataGrid to update a > public variable with the column number. > > Since it seems as though this is an ubiquitous problem, it should be > solved in the language itself. The best approach that I came up with > is to have two new attributes for the mx:DataGridColumn; > > sortDataType - Basically specify the type of data contained in the > column that would be honored by the sort routine irrespective of the > values contained in the column. Values would be any valid data type. > > sortNullCollatingSequence - This would define whether nulls get > sorted to the top or bottom of the list. Values would be low - which > would indicate that nulls would sort lower than the lowest normal > value, and high - which would indicate that nulls would sort higher > than the highest normal value. > > This is one possible solution, there may be better ones but in my > opinion the current method should be improved. I would like to see it > implemented quickly as I believe it is a serious problem. > > How do I go about getting this taken seriously, and not assigned > an "enhancement request number" and never looked at again? > > Paul >
