Sorting by the 'extra' column

ausmani · March 30, 2015

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 · March 30, 2015

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 · March 30, 2015

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.