Column sorting by number

As I can see, all ‘numbers’ are left aligned. This means treated as characters. Hence the sorting may be other than expected. I may help if you enter the attribute 4 as '004’. Give it a try and let us know the results. 

The ATTRIBUTE column is of data type STRING(15)/UPPERCASE, that’s why sorting shows the alphabetical order, not the numeric order. What you are looking for can only be achieved with numeric columns.

You could create a custom numeric column and populate it with the numeric equivalent of the ATTRIBUTE (but what if someone puts in an alphanumeric attribute?), but that sounds like a lot of overhead just for sorting.

It is the same for e.g. Request IDs.
These are not done by ourselves, but from IFS Cloud created automatically.

So why are these done as a String and not a numeric? Is there a logical reason for that?

Thanks,
Chris

One thing you can do if you’re only going to use numbers as text, is create a custom field that basically transforms the text into a number (with validate_conversion) and into NULL if it’s not transformable to a number.

You can then display that “number converted field” and use that to sort, however, like ​@Alexander Heinze said, that’s a lot of overhead and work just to sort a list. 

Thanks for your feedbacks.

May I ask, why this was initially created as a text?

It is not that important to specifically create a new customer column.
 

Regards,
Chris