User Guide
300 Chapter 6: Components Dictionary
The following are possible values for optionsFlag:
• Array.DESCENDING—sorts highest to lowest.
• Array.CASEINSENSITIVE—sorts case-insensitively.
• Array.NUMERIC—sorts numerically if the two elements being compared are numbers. If they
aren’t numbers, use a string comparison (which can be case-insensitive if that flag is specified).
• Array.UNIQUESORT—if two objects in the array are identical or have identical sort fields, this
method returns an error code (0) instead of a sorted array.
• Array.RETURNINDEXEDARRAY—returns an integer index array that is the result of the sort. For
example, the following array would return the second line of code and the array would remain
unchanged:
["a", "d", "c", "b"]
[0, 3, 2, 1]
You can combine these options into one value. For example, the following code combines options
3 and 1:
array.sort (Array.NUMERIC | Array.DESCENDING)
Returns
Nothing.
Description
Method; sorts the items in the data provider in the specified order, using the specified field name.
If the
fieldName items are a combination of text strings and integers, the integer items are listed
first. The
fieldName parameter is usually "label" or "data", but advanced programmers may
specify any primitive value.
This method triggers the
modelChanged event with the event name sort.
This is the fastest way to sort data in a component. It also maintains the component’s selection
state. The
sortItemsBy() method is fast because it doesn’t run any ActionScript while sorting.
The
sortItems() method needs to run an ActionScript compare function, and is therefore
slower.
Example
The following code sorts the items in a list in ascending order using the labels of the list items:
myDP.sortItemsBy("label", "ASC");