Hello,

Sesame's Exports will sort automatically by the first Text field that is set to be exported. So if you export "Last Name", "First Name", "City" in that order. The records will be sorted by "Last Name". If two Last names are the same then the export will sort by First name within the last names that are the same.

-Ray

Export needs to sort in export field order to support the standard format for hierarchial ASCII import/exports (forms with subforms), which requires that the subform records immediately follow the parent records and repeat the parent fields exactly.

I may be wrong, but I believe that all field types sort as though they were string type in ASCII export.

I am having a similar problem and I am wondering if someone can help me out. I have an invoicing application that was created and then old invoices(from Q&A) dating back ~8 years were imported. The invoice layout has a LineItem subform(table view) created using relational linking and the line items were linked to the main invoice form by invoice number. The import of the lineitems went smoothly and everything seemed to work. Until new invoices were added. Once saved and retrieved, the lineitems of the newly added invoices show up on the invoice out of order, as if they are being sorted once saved. An example would be :
LineItem subform has 5 fields in this order, Account#, Description, Quantity, Price and Amount.
When an invoice is entered and saved in this order:

Account #| Description | Qty | Price | Amount |
1                   b                 1        $1          $1
1                   a                               
                    d
                    c

On retrieve the line items change order to this :

Account #| Description | Qty | Price | Amount |
                    d
                    c
1                   a         
1                   b                 1        $1          $1


Excuse the spacing. The line items on the invoices that were imported from Q&A are fine and in order, its just new invoices that are entered and saved that seem to have the line item order mixed up.

I tried exporting the data, deleting the subform, re-created the subform using natural inking and imported the data back in. This seems to have solved the problem of new invoice line items getting moved out of order after saving but now the line items that were imported from Q&A are out of order, as if they have been sorted.
From reading this thread, I understand that sesame's export function automatically sorts the exported data. I took the advice given here and used mass update and SBasic code to export but as far as I can see I can only mass update either the main form or the subform one at a time and therefore I have 2 seperate export files, invoice which has ~12000 records and LineItems which has ~30000 records so I can't use sesame's import function to bring the data back into the form and have the line items match up with the corecct invoices, I think. I may not be approaching the mass update procedure properly. Any help(clarity) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Don                     

NorthGuy's problem should really be a separate thread, has no relation to sort order of exports.  But Carl is right....if the records are in the subform, you can create a default Sort Order.  You can also write a routine to sort the subform items when any item in the sort column is added or modified.  Resort should not be needed if a record is deleted.

(See you at SANE on Saturday, Carl?)
-------------------------------------------------

Re the export sort order.......how about this untested approach? .....
1.  Add a sorting element in the front of the Sesame export as the first data element to be exported.  Make the sort element the same datatype as the one you want to sort on. 
2.  Do a mass update to this new sort element to get the value of the 3rd or 4th, or whatever column you really want to sort on.  After Mass Update, export. and data will be sorted by values in the desired column. 
3.  Now you only need to work around the first column.  There are a number ways you may be able to do that, some will depend on the receiving application.

Some options:
1.  Tell the importing program to ignore the first column.
OR
2.  Run the file thru a text editor and strip off the first column before sending to be imported by receiving program.
OR
3.  Read the file and parse out everything to the left of the first comma (or whatever delimiter you selected).  This could be done in Sesame as part of an Export Button.
OR
4. ........fill in the blanks.... other methods can be considered.

robwood_ok wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2006 at 7:11pm:


There isn't anything in 1.1.4 that would have changed this behavior. We are, however, looking into it for 2.0.

If you need to export and sort in diferent order, eg field order left to right must be last name, first name, birthday, but you want to sort by birthday......

1.  Retrieve all the records that you want to export. 
2.  Then sort the result set by birthday. 
3.  Then do a Mass Update that writes the fields in the result set to a file in the left to right sequence that you want, separating with a semicolon or whatever delimiter you want between each field.  Just loop through all the records starting at result set record 1 until last record is done.

If this is a frequent routine then you could make a macro to do this.

Thanks for adding the single level "flatfile" sort to version 2.0.