Add support for a secondary/numerical sort to aggregators

[bronwyncombs]

Request Summary:

CSIRO has a format and aggregator to order collection relationship items by type (tissues and xrays). They achieved the desired order with the code seen below, but this modification changed the sort order of catalog number from ascending to descending. The overwriting of numerical sorting upon defining an order field is not desired.

From what I can tell, there is no way to alter their record formatter definitions to configure a numerical sort order on top of the field order in xml or visual editing interfaces. Adding support for this capability would be great!

From Zoe on Asana:

Hi Specify,
I've had a simple request from a user, to order the right-side catalog numbers, displayed in a Collection Relationship aggregated view applied from the left-side, so that numbers from a particular relationship appear first. In our instance, we have a list of Specimens on the left, with an aggregated view of all their right-side linked tissue and xray catalog numbers, and we want tissues listed first, then xrays.

This appears related to Aggregation view of linked collection objects. I've had a look at the associated git Add aggregated view of linked collection objects · Issue #3738 · specify/specify7 (github.com) which indicates there is a workaround and suggests creating two aggregations, one for each collection relationship. Although as we want results from both relationships displayed in the view, I'm not sure it solves our issue (as you can only apply one aggregation at a time), unless I've misunderstood.

In our v 7.9.3.1
This is the formatter for Collection Relationship applied:

  <format
        name="ColRel"
        title="ColRel"
        class="edu.ku.brc.specify.datamodel.CollectionRelationship"
        default="true"     >
           <switch single="true">
      <fields>
				<field>rightSide.catalogNumber</field>
			</fields>
		</switch>
    </format>

After some trial and error, and some help from colleague Corinna, I tried the following aggregator (previously aggregator had no orderfieldname applied):

    <aggregator name="ColRel"
                title="ColRel"
                class="edu.ku.brc.specify.datamodel.CollectionRelationship"
                default="true"
                separator=" | "
                ending=""
                count="0"
                format="ColRel"
                orderfieldname="CollectionRelTypeID"

Which gives the result we want, on the most part, in that now our Tissues list before Xrays in the aggregated view. However, the order within each subset appears to be descending (by catalog no.) thought not always - is there a way to apply a secondary order field to an aggregation?

In this example, before the aggregator was changed, it lists GT 16516, then GT 16517.

Following change to aggregator, which got the GT numbers to display first in the view, they now list GT 16517, then GT 16516

Ideally, we want it to be GT 16516, then GT 16517.
Thanks,
Zoe