Important: Contracts and contacts roles sort their contacts on their own 

Description 

A page contact is an inline child of three records at once: of its page, of the contract it belongs to, and of its contacts role. All three relations wrote the same sorting column.

RelationHandler::writeForeignField() numbers the children of the record being saved 1..n in the order of its form, so saving a contract or a contacts role renumbered its contacts across every page that owns one of them. An editor who had arranged the contacts on a page saw that arrangement replaced by the order of an unrelated form, in the backend and, since a page renders its contacts in sorting order, in the frontend as well.

The contract relation and the contacts role relation now have sort columns of their own, tx_academiccontacts4pages_domain_model_contact.contract_sorting and role_sorting of the same table, and order by them. The page keeps sorting , so nothing that renders today changes.

Impact 

Saving a contract or a contacts role no longer changes the order of any page, and a page no longer changes the order those forms show. All three arrangements are kept side by side. TYPO3 v12 and v13 behave alike here.

A contact that joins a contract or a contacts role afterwards is appended to the end of that record's list, whether it was created there, given the relation in the contact form on a page, copied or localized. Changing the relation moves it to the end of the new one. Clearing it removes the contact from that list altogether.

Every contact that existed before the update carries 0 in the new columns. Until the upgrade wizard below has run, a contact saved in the backend keeps no position of its own in those lists. The wizard is the one that knows the order the contracts and contacts roles show today, so a contact whose list is still unseeded is left to it.

Affected Installations 

Every installation of this extension that assigns contacts to contracts or to contacts roles.

Migration 

Add the new columns, which come with ext_tables.sql, in Admin Tools > Maintenance > Analyze Database Structure or with vendor/bin/typo3 extension:setup .

Then run the upgrade wizard Seed the contact sort order of contracts and contacts roles, in Admin Tools > Upgrade > Upgrade Wizard or on the command line:

vendor/bin/typo3 upgrade:run academicContact4pages_seedContactSecondarySorting

It fills the new columns with the order those forms show today, the current sorting of each contact, with uid settling ties. It reports nothing to do afterwards. Running it again is harmless: it appends what has no position yet and never renumbers what has one, so an arrangement made in one of those forms is not reset by it.