Re: [Bibdesk-users] secondary sort key for table display

[Dan T. A. <da...@bi...>]

On 16 May 2011, at 14:46, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> 
> On May 16, 2011, at 22:06, Jan Anderssen wrote:
> 
>> Hi -
>> 
>> I'm wondering if there is, or could be, a way to sort the main table by author and year. 
>> 
>> I realize that it is possible to do this by sorting by year first, and then switching back to sorting by author, but this is not remembered (understandably, since there's no way of telling what my intention was). 
>> 
>> iTunes has recently solved this problem by introducing a few fixed multiple sort criteria, I use "Album by Artist/Year" happily. Another, more general, option might be to explicitly allow multiple sort criteria as e.g. Numbers and Excel do.
>> 
>> I don't have the skills to contribute myself -- maybe one day I will -- but in the meantime, maybe I could add this as a request for help (if the feature exists), or a new feature request (if it doesn't).
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jan
>> 
>> P.S. A note on the recent papers/bibdesk discussion and the shininess factor:
>> 
>> I tried Papers in the beginning, I think partly because of the "shininess" -- the cute little house construction when it started etc.. But then, in complete contrast to the clean look, I actually found it pretty messy with respect to the conceptual underpinning, particularly as witnessed by the initial complete inability to work with bibtex in any sensible way. 
>> 
>> I am a big fan of BibDesk and I'm not even tempted to give Papers another try. I'd trade its shiny mess for the well-thoughtout powerhouse with a look that one may perceiving as slightly more utilitarian any time again. That being said, I have a few friends who happily use Papers as a simple interface to access and somewhat catalogue their pdfs, which I assume it does nicely. So to some extent, I think the user bases of the two programs may be quite different. 
>> 
>> Anyway, a big Thank You! to all BibDesk contributors.
> 
> I don't see a reasonable way we could do this. 
> 
> One big difference between iTunes and BibDesk is that the content of iTunes is pretty much fixed, while for BibDesk it's very versatile. We cannot set a few fixed sort criteria.
> 
> Apart from that, it would require special UI to be able to set search criteria. For this the general remarks on UI clutter apply. You should realize that one of the reasons BibDesk may be good to work with is precisely because we guard very much for good and intuitive UI without too much clutter (though we did sin against it before we fully realized the problems).
> 
> Though perhaps we could try to remember the secondary criterium. However, it is not too reliable, as it can be lost when you use some e.g. external groups (because that sorts by import order). This is an important reason why we never did save it.
> 
> Christiaan
> 
> 
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This won't apply to everyone, but ...
if you define your citation keys in the form

  authorName:year:whatever

then sorting by Cite Key will do what (I think) you want.

[ Of course this approach has zero flexibility! ;-) ]
[ No way to change your ordering on the fly. Sorry. ]