7332 - Sort should be sorted by the actual date, not by alphabets

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect, P3)

Description

[fenella]

RE: Linux, Win32 and Mac dated (1999-05-28-08 m7)
steps:
From Messenger, select View|Sort|By Date or click on the Date column
sort sorts alphabetically, it should have been sorted by the actual date.
Actual result:
When sorting incrementally,
5/5/99 is displayed after 5/28/99
Expected result:
5/5/99 should come before 5/28/99 if it is sorted by actual date.

Comment 1

[Phil Peterson]

Reassign to putterman

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

Robert,

Do you have any idea on how we can do this?

Comment 3

[Robert John Churchill]

Yeah.  Along with resources and strings, RDF allows for integer and date
literals.  Perhaps you should return a date literal instead of a string.  Also,
the XUL sorting code currently only handles strings, so it needs to be made a
bit smarter as well, so that it knows how to sort on date and integer literals
also.

Comment 4

[scottputterman]

If we can do that, that would be great.  The last time I tried using a Date
Literal a few months ago, it didn't work.  Does it work now?

Comment 5

[Robert John Churchill]

I've never tried using it.  What were the problems you were seeing with date
literals?

Comment 6

[lchiang]

<update QA contact>

Comment 7

[scottputterman]

I don't think Date Literals were supported when I tried it.  I'm willing to try
it again if you want to do it.  In order for me to sort by date, we'll have to
do something like this.  I'm changing this milestone to M9, however.

Comment 8

[Robert John Churchill]

Date literals... yep, that's the ticket.

Comment 9

[scottputterman]

I've switched the code over in my tree to use nsIRDFDate which means this should
be taken care of.  I'll check it in either today or tomorrow.  When I check this
in, the fix for Bug 4763, about using I18N format for dates is going to break
until similar code is used in RDF.  It actually turns out that we haven't been
using this fix for a while because of Mac problems in the DateTimeFormat code.
But anyway, this is just a heads up on this.

Comment 10

[nhottanscp]

>Mac problems in the DateTimeFormat code.
Problem was in the Macintosh client (caller) which was passing year based on
1970 instead of 1900 required by tm time. I am adding PRTime support (bug
9229) to nsIDateTimeFormat so the clients have option not to use tm time.

Comment 11

[scottputterman]

I'm now using nsIRDFDate and letting RDF sort for me.  This should be working
now.

Comment 12

[fenella]

Linux and Mac (1999-07-19-11-m9) and Win_nt 4.0 (1999-07-19-12 m9)
I do not see this problem any more.