Sorting by artist doesn't use artist sort-name

in my release collection i often sort by artist (since i find that the easiest).
but the artist are not sorted in order of the sort-name (what i would expect, since otherewise, why do we have the sort-name if it isn’t used to sort by name?)

the sort name for “The Love” is “Love, The” so i would expect that it would be sorted by the “L” and not the “T”.

this is actually the case for all the bands that start with “The”

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That is an old issue, there is a ticket for it.

If you look at the screen, the “sort” is just on the column of data you are looking at. It just sorts what it sees. You’d need to add a new column of data for “Artist Sort Order” to get the sort you’d expect.

im sorry, but no, you cant have a sort-name and then don’t sort names in the order of the sort name.

also, in my collection, i can’t add/change/remove columns so there is no way for mee to do it.

if we don’t order the names in the order of the sort-name, then why is there even a sort-name field?

Track down the ticket and give it a poke. I expect there are better reasons on there why it has not been done yet.

My theory is just based on what I see. A simple text list on a page. There are threads on this somewhere in the past. I’ll see if I can find them.

Haha - funny. One of the previous threads on this was started by me in 2019

(I think I was in a weird argumentative mood that day… :crazy_face: :rofl: Please forgive my madness)

But it does explain why this is not just a simple case of adding an extra column.

And also: Sort Name Ignored In Collections

And likely others… Sometimes things are just not as simple as they look. :slightly_smiling_face:

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ok so maybe a different approach is what is needed to implement the schema change needed?

Well, we’d need some database triggers so that changes to artist_credit_name would generate a new materialized sort name for the artist credit, and either a new table for them or a new column in the artist_credit table, depending on how slow the second is. It’s not trivial, but depending on how much time we have for the schema change this year, we could try to look into it - or a volunteer could, if someone feels strongly enough about it. It’s one of those things that is fairly minor and not super easy, so it gets postponed so other more urgent or simpler things can happen, especially since we still have plenty of unfinished schema change stuff :slight_smile:

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