We have a requirement to display a list of documents in a certain order. This order isn't Alphabetical. I could do it by id but as soon as we insert another document that needs to be displayed some where other than the end of the list it won't work.
Is it possible to do some sort of custom sort were i define the order of the assets??
I remember when looking at MySource 2 you could do a custom sort.
What would be the best way to solve this??
Depends on what you actually want to sort on. Matrix v3.4 and v3.6 greatly enhance the sortability and asset placement within the Asset Listing. At the moment, you can either chose Unsorted (i.e. No sort) or pick one of the provided attributes.
A workaround is to sort by created date and then use the settings screen to set the created date for each asset in order, so that the assets come up in the order you want.
Is there any way to change the Last Mod Date??
the reason i ask this site it to replace another and i would like to set the Last Mod Date to what it was on the old system. I'm displaying the Name and Las Mod Date in the asset listing.
You can only manipulated the Created Date and Published Date (on the Settings screen of the asset). The Last Modified Date changes on every Commit, so it would be impossible to set (in that, you'd change it and it would reset when you hit commit! <grin>).
If you want a custom date field, I recommend (ab)using the Created Date field, as this is never changed by Matrix after the asset is created, while the Last Published date will change each time the asset is made Live.
What sorting enhancements have been made in 3.4.0? I can't see any difference?
Is it going to be possible to sort by a metadata field?
There are no sorting enhancements in 3.4 from 3.2 for the Asset Listing. In v3.6 you can sort on any of the asset attributes, but not on metadata.
Should being able to sort a asset listing by metadata be considered?
I know for me it would solve a major problem as one of the sections of our site (probably close to 500 pdf's broken into sections) need to be in a specific order. So to have a ref metadata field and sort on this would solve this problem.
At the moment i will have to fiddle with the creation date and as you can imagine this is very time consuming.
It should certainly be considered, but its would have interesting performance problems: You'd have to get the entire listing, then the metadata for the entire list, then sort the metadata, then decide which assets to list based on the sorted order.
At the moment, we grab and sort the assets first, then only load up the metadata for the assets we need to list on each page.