We are trying to sort the description of a filed and it is not following the correct ASCII values. What type of sorting values BO is following when we do sorting.
Is it a bug in Business Objects XIR2 software or there are any settings that we need to change to follow in ASCII format.
I am attaching the screen shot of my report as attachment. Capital B is in the first row instead of NULL value before E when I sort on Ascending value. According to ASCII Null is the first value when sorting.
Here are my Environment details…
BOXIR2 SP4
Windows 2003 Server
IIS is the application server
Database is AS400.
The problem I have in even trying to debug this is that you include more than one column. There can be sorts/breaks, etc on the other columns that would not show in this example.
For instance… The Sub Job Numbering (in column 2) would typically override the sort in Column 3, but you obviously have a break in the Job Number (column 1). The Sub Job Number looks like it sorts after column 3 (Job Description).
What does it look like if you remove the break and just place your columns in the order you want them to sort on (left to right)?
I removed the breaks and it is still having the same issue. Not sorting in the ASCII format.
According to SAP that BO XIR2 SP5 is not sorting on ASCII format but XIR3 SP2 is following ASCII format. He is going to test it on XIR2 SP 6 and let me know whether it is working or not.
I am waiting on SAP to get back to me on this issue.
Here is the response from SAP about this sorting problem…
OK, my earlier testing was faulty. Turns out I see the same behavior in
both code streams and that is the behavior you are currently seeing. We
don’t do an ASCII sort and there is no setting you can change to enable
an ASCII sort.
From the development group:
By design we sort alphabetically for strings, as does Word, as this makes more sense in the real world than ASCII sort. E.g. in an ASCII sort all lower case letters come before all upper case letters, so if you were
to sort the following: d, b, E, A, C
ASCII sort would give: b, d, A, C, E
Alphabetical sort would give: A, b, C, d, E
Therefore alphabetical sort makes more sense for a report writer.
(BOB member since 2004-12-16)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2004-12-16)