Sorting by the 'extra' column

ausmani

Hi,

I have been using Zotero for the best part of two years, and for all of that time I have used the 'Extra' column to sort my library items in a custom order (usually the order in which I want to read things). I have been using simple alphanumeric ordering, and it used to work fine--until my most recent update! This is perplexing me, completely. Whenever I ask Zotero to sort by the items in the 'Extra' column, it performs a 'rough' sort, but always with a handful of mistakes ('0' comes after all numbers, for instance, rather than before). Does anyone know whether something has changed, in the newest version? I'm confused.

Thanks

dstillman

What comes after the 0 in the field? It's using natural numeric sorting, meaning that "02" will sort between "1" and "3" and "10" would sort after. That changed quite a few months ago, not recently.

If you don't think that's the issue, take a screenshot, post it to Dropbox or similar, and provide a link here.

ausmani

Thanks Dan. The problem is a bit more bizarre than I originally described, as best I can tell. What seems to happen is this: when I load Zotero afresh, the items seem more or less well ordered, with the exception of the '0' (and it is just the integer '0'). But as I ask Zotero to order on the 'Extra' column, it seems to decide on a slightly different order each time--on some occasions, some of the items with 1's and the 0's come after everything else with alphanumeric input (but before the blank spaces), when I sort in descending order. Each time I re-sort, it runs through a finite number of permutations, but never ending with the right permutation. I suspected this might have something to do with the secondary sort, but I can't discern a pattern even there.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, and for the suggestion to post a link to Dropbox. I will try and do that tomorrow evening.