ThinWire Ajax RIA Framework

I created DropDownSortTest in the apps/test/trunk ThinWire Tests
application in order to flush this out. However, after looking closely at
this, it looks like everything is working as designed and there are a few
issues in the code you provided: 1) If you want to have a GridBox start
out sorted, then you should call setSortOrder AFTER setSortComparator. The
framework currently resets the sortOrder property to
GridBox.Column.SortOrder.NONE upon changing the sortComparator. 2) The
Comparator you outlined compares item 2 against item 1 and that is why the
content is listed in reverse order. As per the Comparator.compare
documentation, compare should return: a negative integer, zero, or a
positive integer as the first argument is less than, equal to, or greater
than the second.

Additionally, it's worth mentioning that only 1 column may be sorted by at
a time in a GridBox. This is because the intention of
sortComparator/sortOrder is to control the visual sorting of columns by the
user. It's not really intended to sort the data in one or more columns for
the purpose of initial display. For that, you should execute a comparator
against a given column using java.util.Collections.sort:

java.util.Collections.sort(col1, new Comparator() {
public int compare(Object o1, Object o2) {
return o1.toString().compareTo(o2.toString());
}
});

And as a final note, I did check in a minor change to GridBox.Column to
make the previously private member DEFAULT_SORT_COMPARTOR public so that
now you can just do the following if you want to leverage the default
string sort:

java.util.Collections.sort(col1, GridBox.Column.DEFAULT_SORT_COMPARTOR);