RE: Sorting GtkListStore date column

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

> I'm fairly new to GTK programming, and I'm helping out on an open
> source GTK-based project (gcvs, part of the cvsgui project.)  We
> have a GtkListStore with a column containing date.  The column is
> specified as G_TYPE_STRING.  When sorted, it does an alphanumeric
> sort, so in English it puts all the Fridays together first,
> followed by all the Mondays, Saturdays, Sundays, etc.Obviously, I
> want to sort this in date sequence.  How do I accomplish this?

Without knowing the exact format of the text, it's hard to help.  For example, if there's a day and month in 
there, it's probably best to ignore the day of week, however if there's only one week worth of data, then you 
probably DO want to sort on day of week.  Based on those assumptions...  Do it the same way you'd do it in 
any other case.

If the text is guaranteed to be cleanly formatted (eg. it's generated by another part of the program), then 
you just read as much of the string as you need to identify the day of week; eg. switch on the second letter, 
then use the first to differentiate the sun/tue case.  However you do it, just rip the day of the week down 
to a number, 0-7, and sort on that.

Of course, a far better way, is to store the date in a binary format (time_t goes well), even if you have to 
convert it at load time, and generate the string representation in a custom data function (fills in the 
STRING column as-needed from time_t data).  This is vastly quicker to sort on, and will also sort on time 
information if it's available, even if it's not being displayed.


Fredderic

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!