Saving a worklist’s “sort by column” preference is an interesting feature because while the concept has been around forever, technically it just came out officially with the 4.3 release. What do I mean exactly? Well the “sort by” preference has always been available in Cerb4 for those who were lucky enough to figure it out; often in the forums I would explain how it works for anyone asking. However there was a catch, I always had to preface my tutorial with it doesn’t work everywhere. Not only could you expect to see things like the Helpdesk reverting your Overview preferences between sessions (logins), other times Cerb4 wouldn’t even remember your setting when you clicked away from a tab.

Well the good news is the developers fixed the entire system in 4.3 and now this Hidden Gem! should work as advertised. And even though we simply fixed a bad “bug”, I like to think of it as a brand new feature that we can actively promote now for the first time… maybe ever!

Customize and Save

So here’s the deal. To save your “sort by” preference for THAT worklist, start by changing the sort order of one of your available columns. Just like traditional software, click the column name to change the up and down arrow to set either chronological or reverse chronological order.

The important part people forget, and why this is such a good “tip”, is the change is only temporary until you click ‘customize’ and save changes. Note you don’t have to make any other modifications, just save.

The next time you log in, the sort order should stay the same.

Multiple Steps: Adding a new column AND sorting by it

For the record, “sort by” is one of three preferences that now successfully hold in 4.3, the other two are Columns and Rows Per Page, which you can tweak in the ‘customize’ menu you passed through earlier. As you know already, only a default subset of columns are used for each worklist. So what happens if you want to expose a new column and then sort by it instead? Unfortunately there is no shortcut and you’ll have to make “customize” a two-step process.

Let’s pretend I want to add the ‘Due’ column to the “Waiting” list and sort those “reopen” dates in chronological order.

Click ‘customize’, add your new column to the active list, and save changes.

Then apply the correct “sort order” to the new column by clicking the ‘Due’ column. To show the tickets ready to reopen first, the arrow points up.

Finally click ‘customize’ again, and save changes once more.

Not the most intuitive solution, as I’ll admit I often forget to “customize” twice too. Just remember you always need to save after you set your sort order!

P.S. As you can tell by my introduction, we have obviously had a bad track record with this bug. So please post any new “dead spots” you may find in the comments, and we will check them out immediately. Thanks!

-joegeck@wgm