Sorting problem - Norwegian

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Hi,
First time poster here. Been exploring Appsheet since the App Maker shutdown notice came.
I’ve learned a lot through the documentation and this community and am close to relasing a couple of simple apps in my organization. Really looking forward to that!

However, I can’t seem to find a solution to (maybe a simple?) sorting problem I’m having.
Being Norwegian, we have a few extra characters in our alphabet compared to English: Æ, Ø and Å.

A sorted (ascending) Norwegian list of names could be:

  • Arne
  • Berit
  • Kåre
  • Lars
  • Vegard
  • Åge

However, in Appsheet this list is sorted like this:

  • Åge
  • Arne
  • Berit
  • Kåre
  • Lars
  • Vegard

“Å” is the last character in our alphabet, not the first.
I’ve tried setting the Data locale for this table to “Norwegian Bokmål (Norway)”, but that didn’t have any effect.
Iv’e tried the view (type Deck) on several clients (windows PCs and Android phones) with different system wide localization settings, both English and Noregian, but this seems to only have an effect on the display of dates(?) and didn’t seem to do anything for my sorting.

The data is coming from a SQL table.

Is there a simple solution to this that I’m not seeing?

2

Welcome to community.
Not perfectly sure if this will help your case, but what about trying this?

For the field you want to sort the rows, take the first character, using Virtual Column as well as LEFT expression. Formula is super simple LEFT([SortingField],1)
You can add and combine additional formula on top of it, but to make the story and discussion simpler, then we create another field to get the number with the simple if expression. To construct the formula, it may be found time consuming, but it looks

IFS(
[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“A”, then 1,
[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“B”, then 2,
[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“C”, then 3,
[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“D”, then 4,
[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“E”, then 5,

continues… till end of the last character

[VirtualFieldForFirstChara]=“Å”, then N,
)

Use this Virtual column to sort the rows, followed by the secondary sort by the actual sorting field.

Community member surely have better solutions, but I just thought this may help.

Or sorry not to say, God morgen, first of all.

3

I just came up with another thought, this may not be the solutions, as you may need to repeat the same for 2nd characters, 3rd characters, 4th characters cont…

But there should be solutions. That s Appsheet.

4

I would encourage you to engage support@appsheet.com directly with this. If your data doesn’t sort according to the device’s locale, I’d call that a bug that should be reported.

5

Thanks tsuji_koichi, and “God kveld” to you!
Your solution would probably work to some degree, but I can’t shake the feeling that it should be unnecessary?

I was about to do as Steve suggests and engage Appsheet support directly. However, I decided to try the app on one more phone first. And lo and behold, on this device the sorting behaved as it should!
So I want to test further before engaging support.

Hopefully, I can report back here in this thread soon.

3 Likes
6

Same problem in Swedish, unsurprisingly. Ever found a solution?

7

Hej, Saldofel, and welcome to the community!

I still have the same problem in Norwegian with æøå

8

@Saldofel and @Ratatosk, please contact support@appsheet.com for help with this.

1 Like