Topic awaiting preservation: Table sorting with DOM

I put this together recently, and was wondering if anyone has an idea on how to improve it. http://stinx.no-ip.org/~rob/table_sort.htm (It's on the end of an adsl line, so don't be too surprised if the link fails)

There's a bit of a hack in there, since I wanted to support text nested inside anchor tags, and also because IE5.5 doesn't seem to support the dom properties. I haven't tried it in anything else except IE5.5 and Moz1.2

Comments / suggestion appreciated - I know I'm going to need this thing fully working for something.

stinx, I didn't have time to look deep into the code but I can say that the capability you have there is *very* useful. I think it can be very useful for database outputs without having to reload everytime a new sorting order is needed. Great idea!

. . : slicePuzzle

nice work.
very cool stuff, i'm quite impressed with this little fella.

...this could be especialyl useful when the database doesn't store views.

my advice is to send the data type with the function, so that it can sort numbers properly...

quick tip - if you were to "parseFloat('08')" it would sort it correctly.

I've got a suggestion, you should place an up or down arrow image next to the column header according to the sort order. That would sweeten it up a bit

. . : slicePuzzle

Looks neat indeed, this sort of script would be very powerful when implemented within a component(like Borland's TDataSetTableProducer). I must say I have encountered a script like this before, but unfortunately, I can't find the site .

Maybe you could reverse the vertical sorting algorithm when clicking on a header which is already selected..

Thanks for the feedback. I probably won't get round to improving it until I need to, but the ideas are sound.

The first priority for me would be to allow sorting numerically or alphanumerically (the parseFloat idea) - maybe even a couple of other methods. I had considered adding arrows, but I wanted it to be as inconspicuous as possible, to use on any layout. I suppose it depends on what it gets used for eventually.

Hmm... it would probably be best to put the TD's into an array, and then use array.sort with a custom sorting function that compares the values of the cells. That way, you're letting the browser do the sorting (which is a lot faster). Then, afterwards, you have to loop through the array and rearrange the table cells to be in the new positions. I'm not sure how that would be done, but there's probably a way.

Quite right about that, Slime ... how about this version? http://stinx.no-ip.org/~rob/table_sort2.htm

I have to declare a global var now, since the compare function in array.sort() only takes two arguments, but it does look a lot cleaner I daresay that the compare method (ascii or numeric), and the sort order (ascending or descending) will also have to be global.

Looping through the array and using appendChild() works, since it removes the element from it's place in the document first, and tags it on the end. This could be a fair amount of pointless work for a table that is already sorted.

[This message has been edited by stinx (edited 12-12-2002).]