Help:DPL/manual/sorting

DPL3 allows you to define the sort order of its output as is explained below.

ordermethod

ordermethod

Determines what criterion (resp. criteria) is (resp. are) used to order the list.

Syntax:

ordermethod=method1,method2,... 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)

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 page_touched field in 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 linksfrom or linksto statement. pagesel only makes sense if there is more than one page mentioned in the linksfrom or linksto condition.

title

outputs list sorted by article (prefix +) title

titlewithoutnamespace

outputs list sorted by the article name regardless of namespace

methodN can also be one of the following token combinations (see also 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. — (default)

Example:

{{#dpl:
|category=Africa
|ordermethod=lastedit
}}

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

order

order

Controls the sort direction of the list.

Example:

order=orderdirection

orderdirection can be one of:

• descending — outputs list from most recent to least recent
• ascending — outputs list from least recent to most recent — (default)

Example:

{{#dpl:
|category    = Africa
|ordermethod = lastedit
|order       = ascending
|addeditdate = true
}}

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

ordercollation

ordercollation

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 ordercollation=bridge.

Example:

ordercollation=latin1_german_ci

You may want to try latin1_swedish_ci 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.

Notes

In some cases the above 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 analyze 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 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);

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DPL manual (Help:DPL)