Sortable fields (information that can order contacts on the public side of the site) are fields that appear in the sort filter selection box of the Trombinoscope views and/or add sort functionality for columns in the Trombinoscope (list) view.
When is a field sortable?
- when it is the name field,
- when it is specified as such in the contact information tab and it is a standard contact field (core Joomla field),
- Joomla 3.7+ when it is specified as such in the contact information tab and it is a non-multi-values custom field.
This comes under certain limitations.
The name field
The name field is sortable if:
- the items are ordered by name,
- the items are ordered by sort field (ordering by sort field gives the best results when ordering contacts).
The standard contact fields
The sortable fields are, as a basic rule, the ones that have their own column in the contacts database table.
These are:
- position,
- phone,
- mobile,
- fax,
- email,
- webpage,
- address,
- city,
- state,
- postal code,
- country,
- other information.
Fields added by the Add key contact fields plugin
Those fields are not sortable UNLESS their functionality is associated with a custom field. This is the case for the birthday and age fields (to associate a custom field to a specific functionality, please check the global configuration page: shared options).
Joomla 3.7+The custom fields
A custom field should be set as sortable only if its value is unique. A multiple-choice custom field of type checkbox will not be a good candidate, for instance, while a custom field of type text or radio will be.
- If custom fields have been added to contacts but those contacts have not been saved afterwards, the values of the custom fields for the contacts are inexistant, even if you have set a default value in the custom field. Therefore, when sorting, only the contacts with valid custom field values will show.
- In general, contacts won't show if there is no value for the custom field. Therefore, make sure you order by a custom field only if you have a value for that custom field for all contacts.
