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Sorting Variants

Create Your Own Custom Sorting Methods

Issue: 23.2 (March/April 2025)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,774
Starting Page Number: 59
Article Number: 23206
Resource File(s):

project 23206.zip Updated: 2025-03-02 13:15:06

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

If you're like me, you love that Xojo has a built-in method for sorting arrays: myArray.sort. Unfortunately, this only works with strings and numbers. If the array contains objects like folderItems, dateTime items, or your own custom class, it can't be sorted.

I've run into this so often that I have created utility routines that sort these by temporarily copying the items into a new array with the data in string format and sorting that. For example, for dates, I might convert them to SQLDate. Then I have to convert them back and replace the original array with the new one.

Since Xojo is so fast and my data needs aren't huge, this isn't a slow process—but it is inefficient and has always bugged me. Looking through Xojo's example projects, I noticed a sort example that takes a different approach. Here, we create our own compare method that gets passed to the sort routine, like this:

myArray.sort(addressOf dateCompare)

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