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two level sorting

 
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On a web app, it is common to allow sorting of a table by clicking on something in the column header. It then shows whether the column is sorted ascendingly/descendingly.

Has anyone seen two levels of sorting? I'm trying to determine if there are any standards or common conventions for this. For example, I would want to be able to sort by authors and then sort by titles if there were two or more books by the same author. It would be possible to do this for any combination of two columns. So it's either two levels of sorting or sticky sorting.

My thoughts are that you would have to either stick something else in the column header or provide two pull downs to select the columns from. I suspect shoving more in the column header will make it crowded and hard to use.
 
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Yeah, there is no friendly way of showing sorting. In one application I wored on, there was a options pane that would slide open and let the ueser arrange the columns and the sort would be doe with thise. Basically a list with up down arrows.

Another app I saw used the up down arrows with numbers in them, made no sense to me when I first saw it.

I have seen ones where you do the control click and it would sort columns.

I say try to find out what makes sense to the user.

Eric
 
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Originally posted by Eric Pascarello:
Yeah, there is no friendly way of showing sorting.


Thanks Eric. I didn't find anything after a lot of searching, so I feel more comfortable when you say there isn't some standard I'm missing.

I have a couple things to propose: two pull downs, check box at the bottom to make sorting sticky. We'll create prototypes and show them to the users. I wanted to check here first because once you give the users a choice, you have to go with it. And I didn't want to give them a non-standard choice and be stuck with it forever.
 
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