Incorrect sort order with value.sort and alphaGroup

[simbun]

I've recently started sorting my albums (except for compilations) by date so I can see when they were released in the context of an artists career, but I noticed that when drilling through certain values of an index I'd get the albums out of order, and after some testing I think I've found why.

Where an albums alphaGroup is in affect but the returned albums all fall under a single group (Album.value.sort={Date} all fall under #), if the number of albums returned is greater than the albums alphaGroup setting AND greater than the listViewAlbums setting, the albums are sorted incorrectly.

The easiest way to reproduce this is:
alphaGroup: albums=5
listViewAlbums: 5
tagValue: Album.value.sort={Date}

Then tag greater than 5 albums (that have different release dates) that start with the same letter, with a unique genre, then navigate to that genre and look under [n] albums.

[simoncn]

Can you post an example of the incorrect sort order?

[simbun]

(06-12-2020 21:20)simoncn Wrote:  Can you post an example of the incorrect sort order?

Find attached a screenshot from BubbleUPnP. The exact same results can be seen in Hi-Fi Cast too (well, at least the first 20 are).

I have a tagFormat something similar to Album.displayFormat={$Date^^ - ^$Album}

   

[simoncn]

I have found the cause of the problem. It will be fixed in the next MinimServer update. Thanks very much for letting me know about this.

[simbun]

That's excellent Simon.

Whilst we're on the subject of alphaGroups...what would be really good (as I don't believe it's possible at the moment but happy to be corrected) is if there was some way of telling SortTags/MinimServer to use a particular tag for alphaGroup'ing purposes. This way, whilst you could have the list display by Date followed by Album, if you were presented with a big list (like if you selected '[n] Albums' at the top level) you'd be able to filter them based on the first letter of the Album, rather than have them all belong to #.

One way you could achieve this without creating any new options would be to use the first non-numeric column passed to SortTags.
Obviously I have no idea how much sense that makes internally to MinimServer, but I think it would be an elegant approach.