Sort order is not respected

[pjaitken]

Describe the issue

Starting at https://datatracker.ietf.org

Select "Author or Affiliation Name", put "ciena" into the box, and click "Search", which gets to this page:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/search?name=&sort=&rfcs=on&activedrafts=on&by=author&author=ciena

Clicking any of the column headers immediately sorts the page by that column.

Then a moment later the page reverts to the original order - at which time the "&sort=..." value in the URL changes, reflecting which header was selected.

So there are three issues:

1. The page refresh is not required.
2. The "&sort=..." in the URL doesn't work.
3. The "&sort=..." in the URL doesn't accommodate reverse sorting.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the IETF's Code of Conduct

[rjsparks]

I'm not quickly reproducing this behavior.

What browser/OS are you seeing it with? Are you running with anything blocked (such as not running javascript)?

[kivinen]

This only happens if you press the actual link in the header, i.e., when sorting using status column if you press actual "Status" text which is link pointing to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/search?activedrafts=on&author=ciena&by=author&name=&rfcs=on&sort=status then it sorts the page, but immediately reloads the page with original sorting. If you press the arrows after word "Status" sorting works.

[rjsparks]

ah - interacting with the attempt to work for non-js users. If js is present, perhaps those links should go away?

[kivinen]

On seamonkey the sorting works in both ways, most likely because the javascript that sorts the table after load crashes on error before it manages to sort the table. My previous test was done on firefox where I can see that table is sorted properly if I put breakpoint at the end of page, but then tablesorter resorts the page after page load finishes.

[kivinen]

ah - interacting with the attempt to work for non-js users. If js is present, perhaps those links should go away?

No, because you come to the page also using direct link, and it would be nice to be able to specify the sorting order for the page inside the link.

Tablesorter should understand that if there is sort keyword on the url, it should use that as its initial sort order.

[kivinen]

My tests with seamonkey with broken javascript was wrong. It does not sort the table properly, i.e., the sorting does not work at all without javascript. If I go to the search page with javascript disabled I get following view:

and if I then click IPR I get following error:

So sorting does not work at all with javascript, but it would be still nice to be able to create links that sets the initial sort order for the tablesorter tables. I think this might be bit more general change.

[kivinen]

It seems the ietf/static/js/list.js has code at the end saying:

                if (!params.sort) {
                    // else, if there is a data-default-sort attribute on a column, pre-sort the table on that
                    const presort_col = $(header_row).children("[data-default-sort]:first");
                    if (presort_col) {
                        const order = presort_col.attr("data-default-sort");
                        if (order === "asc" || order === "desc") {
                            $.each(list_instance, (_, e) => {
                                e.sort(presort_col.attr("data-sort"), {
                                    order: order,
                                    sortFunction: text_sort
                                });
                            });
                        }
                    }
                }

which checks if we have sort parameter on the url, and if so it will not sort the table in the tablesorter, but assumes table is already in correct order, except something else still calls tablesorter to sort the table.

Fix would be to add else part to that and fill in the sort_list to the table sorter where the sort_list is array [n, 0], where n is the column number matching the "sort" parameter, and 0 means ascending sort (or 1 for descending, but I think we do not support urls sorting in descending order).

[pjaitken]

I see this in Microsoft Edge. Javascript isn't blocked.

Clicking the arrows above the columns works as expected. A distinction between the column titles and the arrows was unexpected!

Clicking the column title word(s) sorts the column correctly, but loads a new page where the sort order is specified in the URL. Hovering over the words shows the URL that will be loaded. Hovering over the arrows shows no URL.

So, a) it's unnecessary to load the new page (unless javascript is blocked), and b) the sort-order in the URL isn't respected.

[kivinen]

Robert Sparks writes:

Closed #9136 as completed via #9227.

I think the issue still is that if someone uses sort parameter on the url, that does not have any effect. We should either remove the sort parameter from the urls or fix it. So this only partially fixes this issue. -- ***@***.***

[pjaitken]

Closed #9136 as completed via #9227.

@NGPixel, @rjsparks, @jennifer-richards I still see the same issue; nothing has changed. Was the PR code deployed?