Redmine

I have a codefix for this problem but I'm using an old version (3.4) and I'm not real great with plugins etc, so I thought I could post this here since a) it seems a lot of people have bee looking for a fix, and b) if it hasn't already been fixed in the pater versions (I'm assuming it has!) then this could be a useful way to do this. It's kind of a hack but here we go -

• PROBLEM - On a project with a lot of parent/child tasks, you often want to sort 1) by the parent, then 2) by whatever field you want afterwards, like status, or subject, or whatever. But a multi field sort doesn't work like that - the secondary sort is just ignored.

• CAUSE - if you look at the code under app/models/issue_query.rb, you can see under the class IssueQuery that it uses this code for a parent sort -

QueryColumn.new(:parent, :sortable => ["#{Issue.table_name}.root_id", "#{Issue.table_name}.lft ASC"], :default_order => 'desc', :caption => :field_parent_issue),

which means that it will sort by the root_id first (the top level task) and then by the internal lft field which is maintained internally. Some plugins are available to move that lft/rgt ordering around but I couldn't get those to work in my (old) version. So I wanted to change that sort.

• SOLUTION - what I want is for the upper level sort to occur with the parent level task at the top, and then all of the subtasks below, UNORDERED. This is important, because what I want to do is sort those subtasks however I want - by subject, by ID, by status, by priority etc. SO anyways, this is the code that does that (yeah, it's a hack, I'm sure it could be done better by pretty much anyone, but I'm desperate here!! :-) )

Replace the code above with this -

QueryColumn.new(:parent, :sortable => ["#{Issue.table_name}.root_id", "if (#{Issue.table_name}.rgt - #{Issue.table_name}.lft > 1, #{Issue.table_name}.id+0, #{Issue.table_name}.parent_id+0.1) ASC"], :default_order => 'desc', :caption => :field_parent_issue),

So what that does is to say first of all use the root_id as normal, but then if the rgt/lft values indicate that it's got subtasks (i.e. an rgt-lft value over 1 indicates this) then use the id itself, but if it hasn't, then use the parent_id (i.e. the upper level) plus some additional number (I've used 0.1 here). So the upper task will appear at the top, and subtasks below UNORDERED as you want.

EXAMPLE - this is the query I used to test it out.

Anyways, like I say this is a hack because I just use this code internally, but if anyone could build it into a simple patch or plugin or (if it hasn't already been solved in later versions) the base code could be updated, I think this seems to work. My apologies to everyone that I'm not good enough to do all of this properly but I thought the fix might be useful and wanted to contribute back to what I always think is the BEST all-in-one tracker/PM tool at any price. Redmine ROCKS!