Sorting on Alias

I'd love to be able to sort on an item's alias. Currently it doesn't seem to be an option either in the default list of options or as a custom field.

Hello

it is trivial to add, but why would we add this ?

it sounds very uncommon, also how would you call / "name" this sorting option ?

It probably is pretty uncommon! There are situations where it can be useful, though.

In my case, I have items sorted by a custom date field. Sometimes the items have the same date -- and the order within that date still matters. My aliases all follow a specific format which ends with the date (essentially, category1-category2-20160527) and if there's more than one on a date, they get a letter added to the end (so the second would end with -20160527b, the third with -20160527c, etc.). Currently, I have to arrange them in both their categories by hand so that they get returned in the correct order. If I could use the alias as my secondary sorting criterion, I wouldn't need to do that anymore.

I'd probably call it 'Alias - Ascending' and 'Alias - Descending'.

Hello

ok, will add this to category-based views and universal module

since it is trivial work to add
no performance issue
and by default it will not be shown in frontend selector (user must configure it for it to appear in frontend selector)

Language strings will be:

FLEXI_ORDER_ALIAS="Item code (alias)"
FLEXI_ORDER_ALIAS_REVERSE="Item code (alias) Reverse"

Thank you! It'll be very handy for me in my category and search result views.

I've just tested the current 3.1 dev version since I saw it said the alias sorting was the latest change, and although I know it's all being busily worked on I wanted to let you know that the alias sort doesn't quite work yet -- it looks like it's because it's trying to get the alias from #__flexicontent_items_tmp and there's no alias column there.

Error message:
1054 - Unknown column 'i.alias' in 'order clause' SQL=SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS DISTINCT i.id FROM #__flexicontent_items_tmp AS i JOIN #__flexicontent_types AS ty ON i.type_id = ty.id JOIN #__flexicontent_cats_item_relations AS rel ON rel.itemid = i.id JOIN #__categories AS c ON c.id = i.catid LEFT JOIN #__flexicontent_fields_item_relations AS f ON f.item_id = i.id AND f.field_id=17 WHERE 1 AND rel.catid IN ('89') AND ( i.state IN (1, -5) ) AND ( ( i.publish_up = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' OR i.publish_up <= UTC_TIMESTAMP() ) ) AND ( ( i.publish_down = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' OR i.publish_down >= UTC_TIMESTAMP() ) ) AND ( i.language LIKE 'en%' OR i.language="*" ) AND ty.access IN (0,1,1,5) AND c.access IN (0,1,1,5) AND i.access IN (0,1,1,5) ORDER BY CAST(f.value AS DATE) ASC, i.alias ASC, i.title LIMIT 0, 10

I don't expect this to be your major priority or anything, but I thought I should let you know.