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Ordering configuration¶

The sorting of records can also be defined inside the Data Filter. There again the syntax for expressions can be used. The general syntax, however, is a bit different, since both a field and a sort order must be defined for each sorting criterion, plus an optional engine. So an actual ordering definition might look like:

field = tx_specialsearch_pi1|sort // items.name
order = tx_specialsearch_pi1|order
engine = source

In this case the name of the field to use for ordering will be fetched from variable tx_specialsearch_pi1[sort]. If not defined, the default search will use the "name" field from the "items" table. The sorting order will be fetched from variable tx_specialsearch_pi1[order]. There are no restrictions on the values of the order property. It is up to the Data Provider to implement whatever is meaningful for itself, and default to some appropriate ordering if the values provided by the filter are not valid within its context.

The engine property is optional. It can be used to define where the ordering should happen, that is either at the "source" (the data source queried by the Data Provider) or in the "provider" (with some PHP code inside the Data Provider, after the data is fetched). If the value is other than "source" or "provider", it will be replaced by a blank string, instructing the Data Provider to use its default behavior. Refer to the Tesseract manual for more details.

Random ordering¶

For random ordering, the simple keyword \rand can be used. There's no need to define any "field" or "order" (as per the above configuration). Just a single line with the keyword:

\rand

Any appearance of the \rand keyword will trigger random ordering. Thus the following lines have the same effect:

field = \rand
order = \rand

Note that all other ordering configurations will be ignored if the keyword \rand is found on any line.