Hey Rob,

In Clearspace we use Java's String.compareTo() method. Unfortunately this method compares strings lexicographically. This means the character with the lowest unicode value will be first. As far as I can tell there is no way to have java convert chinese characters to pinyin before comparing them. The reason the list appears out of order is because, as you mentioned, Java is sorting them based on their multibyte unicode value.

I can file this as a bug for you if you'd like. Unfortunately to sort chinese correctly it would take a fairly involved code change so I'm not sure how long it would take for this fix to be implemented.

Hey Robert,

Which page were you looking at when using sorting? The admin console? Could you give me the URL you're visiting so that I can be sure to look at the correct portion of our code?

Hey Chad,

Sorry for the back and forth here, I should have asked this earlier. Could you tell me which version of Clearspace you're currently using or plan to go live on?

Hey Chad,

I've traced through our source for the use cases you metioned above: People lists, Blog lists, and Group lists. The ordering of these elements in a list is done in a different location for each feature.

For people lists, we use a Lucene SortComparator. Lucene is an indexing API we use to index all of our content. SortComparatorSource is an interface that only has one method called newComparator which will return an object that can be used to compare two elements. For a example of this interface being implemented, have a look at a class named SortComparator in the Lucene source. We use Lucene's default SortComparator, which utilizes String.compareTo(), which as I mentioned above, doesn't handle chinese characters correctly. In order to get the people list sorting correctly, you'll need to implement your own PeopleAction, which will extend the default PeopleAction. The main thing you'd want to change is the getSortOrder() method. Here you'll want to return your own Lucene Sort object that will use a SortComparator that uses RuleBasedCollector to compare, instead of String.compareTo().

For Blog lists, we also use Lucene, but in a different way. We use the DbSearchQueryManager to ultimately query Lucene. The object you'll ultimately want to modify is the SearchQueryResultRelevenceComparator. By default this class's compare() method uses String.compareTo() to compare objects. You'll want to modify this to use your RuleBasedCollector.

Finally, group lists don't actually use Lucene, they query the database directly. That means the sort order is ultimately determined by SQL. So inorder for groups to be sorted by pinyin, your database is going to need to be able to use the 'SORT BY' SQL keywords to sort by pinyin. I'm not sure if this is possible in any database, but that is a different discussion. If there's need to modify the query that returns these items, it can be found in SocialGroupDAOImpl on line 500.

Hey Chad,

I've actually filed this as a bug on our end. I just thought you'd like to know where the customizations would take place, in case you didn't want to wait for them to be implemented in a bug-fix release.

Thanks Sean.