Help:DPL Manual/Controlling output order

DPL allows you to define the sort order of its output as is explained below.

In some cases this is not sufficient, however. Think of the following example: You create a list of pages which use a certain template. You want to show the value of the first parameter each page uses when calling that template. This can easily be done with the feature of DPL. If you now wanted the output to be sorted by the value of that parameter DPL could not help because it had to analyse all articles before finding those parameter values.

But there is another way: Create a sortable wiki table (using the option of DPL with 'class=sortable') and you can click on the column headings to sort your output accordingly. However, the initial order shown in that table will still be the order in which DPL parsed the wiki pages (usually an alphabetic order of the page names).

Using a handful of javascript lines you can sort a wikitable on pageLoad by any column. You must insert that javascript code AT THE END of your page :

sortables_init; // sort the first sortable table; change [0] to sort other tables. tab = document.getElementsByTagName("table")[0]; // sort by the first column; change [0] to sort by other columns. hdr = tab.getElementsByTagName("th")[0]; // get the sort button link lnk = hdr.getElementsByTagName("a")[0]; ts_resortTable(lnk);

The wikibits.js usually is called at the end of a page and performs sortables_init. If we call it ourselves it will not recognize this and therefore it will add its sort link buttons a second time (which looks quite funny...). You can teach wikibits.js to be aware of initialized sortable tables by adding the following if-statement around the line where it inserts the href for the sort button (near line 550 in MW 1.13): if (cell.innerHTML.indexOf("sortheader") < 0) { ... place the original code line here ... }

ordermethod
Syntax:

means ordered by method1 first, then by method2, etc. (like the ORDER clause in SQL)

methodN can be one of the following single tokens:


 * categoryadd: outputs list based on most recent addition to the first category (requires to include one category and one only using 'category' parameter)
 * counter: outputs list based on the number of times the page has been viewed (by ~popularity)
 * size: outputs list based on the size of the article (bytes of wiki text)
 * firstedit: outputs list based on first edit to the pages (creation)
 * lastedit: outputs list based on most recent edit to the pages
 * pagetouched: outputs list based on 'page_touched' timestamp. Read comment on  field in Page_table to see the difference from most recent edit by an author.
 * pagesel: outputs list based on the names of the reference pages which are used in the selection of a  or   statement. pagesel only makes sense if there is more than one page mentioned in the   or   condition.
 * title: outputs list sorted by article (prefix +) title
 * titlewithoutnamespace: outputs list sorted by the article name regardless of namespace &mdash; (default)

methodN can also be one of the following token combinations (see also option):


 * category,firstedit: outputs list sorted by category, then by first edit
 * category,lastedit: outputs list sorted by category, then by last edit within a category
 * category,pagetouched: outputs list sorted by category, then by pagetouched
 * category,sortkey
 * sortkey: outputs list sorted by title and sortkey, requires at least one category statement
 * user,firstedit: outputs list sorted by user, then by firstedit by the user
 * user,lastedit: outputs list sorted by user, then by lastedit by the user


 * none: do not apply any ordering (except ordering by timestamp if you requested a list of revisions); this method must be used when you specify openreferences=yes'''.

Note: For downward compatibility reasons DPL will use 'addfirstcategory' as its default order method if called via the &lt;dynamicPageList&gt;

Example:

 category=Africa ordermethod=lastedit 

This list will output pages that have showing most recently edited articles at the top.

order
Example:

orderdirection can be one of:
 * descending &mdash; outputs list from most recent to least recent
 * ascending &mdash; outputs list from least recent to most recent &mdash; (default)

Example:

 category   = Africa ordermethod = lastedit order      = ascending addeditdate = true 

This list will output pages that have shown ordered from oldest to newest. In addition the edit date will be presented with each article.

ordercollation
defines the collating sequence for ordering.

Note: A very special (proprietory) function can be used to sort card suit symbols according to the rank of suits that is used in the card game of bridge (this cannot be done by standard collating sequences). To trigger this function set.

Example:

You may want to try  or other collation mapping table names as well.

If you use a name for the first time you should make sure that it is correctly spelt. Otherwise you will see a SQL error message.

For case insensitivity during the selection of articles, see