I'm trying to sort my table first on the 'Ports Column' and after on the 'Instance Column' this to reflect the WebUi of the device correctly.
In DataMiner I get the following result:
I would expect the strings to be sorted based on the first char, second char, third char, and so on; but this doesn't seem to be the case.
When I export my table to Excel and apply the same sorting the result is as I desire:
This makes me wonder if DataMiner uses a different way of sorting (maybe hash-based?)
Hi Jelle, the sorting that is applied is the natural sorting algorithm as of RN21705. Strings are ordered in alphabetical order, except for multi-digit numbers that are treated atomically as if they were a single character.
In your example this comes to DataMiner seeing/sorting this:
0texttext
29texttext
885texttext
943texttext
26075texttext
So it kind of does make sense if you consider it like above, but it's not as desired/expected. This has been fixed for MAC addresses with RN22243 (feature release 9.6.9), it doesn't mention anything about GUID format so I guess that GUIDs are still having the natural sorting algorithm like you're seeing here.
Is there a reason why the exceptional case was hardcoded only for MAC addresses instead of making a new option out of it? There are more cases besides MAC addresses for doing this type of sorting.
What happens when you only sort on instance, and not on port?