View source for DPL:Manual - DPL parameters: Controlling output order

{{Type Manual|section=Controlling output order}}

DPL allows you to define the sort order of its output as is explained below. 

In some cases this is not sufficient, however. Think of the following example: You create a list of pages which use a certain template. You want to show the value of the first parameter each page uses when calling that template. This can easily be done with the [[include]] feature of DPL. If you now wanted the output to be sorted by the value of that parameter DPL could not help because it had to analyse all articles before finding those parameter values.

But there is another way: Create a ''sortable wiki table'' (using the [[table]] option of DPL with 'class=sortable') and you can click on the column headings to sort your output accordingly. However, the initial order shown in that table will still be the order in which DPL parsed the wiki pages (usually an alphabetic order of the page names).

Using a handful of javascript lines you can sort a wikitable ''on pageLoad'' by any column. You must use an extension like [[Javascript extension]] or find some other way to insert that javascript code AT THE END of your page :

  sortables_init();
  // sort the first sortable table; change [0] to sort other tables.
  tab = document.getElementsByTagName("table")[0];
  // sort by the first column; change [0] to sort by other columns.
  hdr = tab.getElementsByTagName("th")[0];
  // get the sort button link
  lnk = hdr.getElementsByTagName("a")[0];
  ts_resortTable(lnk);

The ''wikibits.js'' usually is called at the end of a page and performs ''sortables_init()''. If we call it ourselves it will not recognize this and therefore it will add its sort link buttons a second time (which looks quite funny...). You can teach wikibits.js to be aware of initialized sortable tables by adding the following if-statement around the line where it inserts the href for the sort button (near line 550 in MW 1.13):  
  if (cell.innerHTML.indexOf("sortheader") < 0) { ... place the original code line here ... }


__TOC__


===ordermethod===

{{DPL parameter
 |name   = ordermethod
 |purpose= Determines what criterium (resp. criteria) is (resp. are) used to order the list.
}}

Syntax:

<code>ordermethod=<i>method1,method2,...</i></code> means ordered by method1 first, then by method2, etc. (like the ORDER BY clause in SQL)

''methodN'' can be one of the following single tokens:

;''categoryadd'': outputs list based on most recent addition to the first category (requires to include one category and one only using 'category' parameter)
;''counter'': outputs list based on the number of times the page has been viewed (by ~popularity) 
;''size'': outputs list based on the size of the article (bytes of wiki text)
;''firstedit'': outputs list based on first edit to the pages (creation)
;''lastedit'': outputs list based on most recent edit to the pages
;''pagetouched'': outputs list based on 'page_touched' timestamp. Read comment on <code>page_touched</code> field in [[mw:Page_table|Page_table]] to see the difference from most recent edit by an author.
;''pagesel'': outputs list based on the names of the reference pages which are used in the selection of a <tt>linksfrom</tt> or <tt>linksto</tt> statement. ''pagesel'' only makes sense if there is more than one page mentioned in the <tt>linksfrom</tt> or <tt>linksto</tt> condition.
;''title'': outputs list sorted by article (prefix +) title
;''titlewithoutnamespace'': outputs list sorted by the article name regardless of namespace &mdash; '''(default)'''

''methodN'' can also be one of the following token combinations (see also [[DPL:Manual - DPL parameters: Controlling output format#headingmode|''headingmode'']] option):

;''category,firstedit'': outputs list sorted by category, then by first edit
;''category,lastedit'': outputs list sorted by category, then by last edit within a category
;''category,pagetouched'': outputs list sorted by category, then by pagetouched
;''category,sortkey''
;''sortkey'': outputs list sorted by title and sortkey, requires at least one category statement
;''user,firstedit'': outputs list sorted by user, then by firstedit by the user
;''user,lastedit'': outputs list sorted by user, then by lastedit by the user

;''none'': do not apply any ordering (except ordering by timestamp if you requested a list of revisions); this method '''must be used when you specify '''openreferences=yes'''.

Note:
For downward compatibility reasons DPL will use 'addfirstcategory' as its default order method if called via the &lt;dynamicPageList&gt;

Example:

<pre><nowiki>
<DPL>
  category=Africa
  ordermethod=lastedit
</DPL>
</nowiki></pre>

This list will output pages that have <nowiki>[[Category:Africa]]</nowiki> showing most recently edited articles at the top.

===order===

{{DPL parameter
 |name   = order
 |purpose= Controls the sort direction of the list.
}}

Example:

<code>order=<i>orderdirection</i></code>

''orderdirection'' can be one of:
* ''descending'' &mdash; outputs list from most recent to least recent
* ''ascending'' &mdash; outputs list from least recent to most recent &mdash; '''(default)'''

Example:

<pre><nowiki>
<DPL>
  category    = Africa
  ordermethod = lastedit
  order       = ascending
  addeditdate = true
</DPL>
</nowiki></pre>

This list will output pages that have <nowiki>[[Category:Africa]]</nowiki> shown ordered from oldest to newest.
In addition the edit date will be presented with each article.


===ordercollation===

{{DPL parameter
 |name   = ordercollation
 |purpose= Allow individual collations, make case insensitive sorting possible
}}

defines the collating sequence for ordering.

Note: A very special (proprietory) function can be used to sort card suit symbols according to the rank of suits that is used in the card game of bridge (this cannot be done by standard collating sequences). To trigger this function set <tt>ordercollation=bridge</tt>.

Example:

<code>ordercollation=<i>latin1_german_ci</i></code>

You may want to try <tt>latin1_swedish_ci</tt> or other collation mapping table names as well.

If you use a name for the first time you should make sure that it is correctly spelt. Otherwise you will see a SQL error message.

For case insensitivity during the ''selection'' of articles, see [[ignorecase]].