1258001 - Clicking on column heading in the thread pane always sorts in ascending order, should respect previous sort direction of this column.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[V@no]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160303134406

Steps to reproduce:

In the list of messages click on any column header that is not currently sort by. 


Actual results:

It changes sort to that column as it supposed to, however it also changes the order.


Expected results:

It should change the sort but leave current order until the same header clicked again.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I don't understand what you're complaining about.

Clicking on a column header will sort the messages by this column, so of course the order of the messages will change.

Which order don't you want to change? If necessary, you can attach an annotated screen shot to explain what you mean.

Comment 2

[V@no]

When you switching columns, the order should stay the same.

So here is more details:

First sort by date column with descending order.
Now click on subject column header. It will sort by subject but in ascending order. Now change order to descending and click on any other column header, it will sort by that column, but in descending order.

It seems the order resets to ascending when sorting changed. IMO it should not change.

Comment 3

[V@no]

****, sorry, incorrect description. should be:
Now change order to descending and click on any other column header, it will sort by that column, but in ASCENDING order.

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I'm not sure that I summarised correctly what you're trying to say. My guess is:

  Clicking on column heading in the thread pane always sorts in ascending order,
  should respect previous sort direction of this column.

So say you want to sort by date descending. You click on "Date" and then you have to click again to get the descending order.

Now you sort by subject. Later you return to sort by date. But you'd prefer to go straight back to the descending order you had before.

Is that what you're saying? I can see that this would be handy to have.

I don't think it makes sense to carry over the direction to the next column. So if you sort by subject in descending order, I would *not* sort the next column you click on also in descending order. It makes more sense to restore the previous order of that column.

Altogether, this is an enhancement, most likely using a preference, so we don't change existing behaviour.

Magnus, Aceman: Opinions?

Comment 5

[V@no]

Persistent order per column would be the best. However simply removing reset order to default ascending when sort changed would be sufficient.
Also if changed to date related column is should default to descending (unless persistent order per column implemented and user previously changed it).

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I think persistent order would be best.

Comment 7

[Dan Harkless]

Can the reporter or someone else with the privilege to do so update this bug so that it's "Version: All" rather than "Version: 38 Branch", so it hopefully gets more traction?  Per my searching, there does not appear to be any add-on that works around this problem.

I agree it would be best to persist the sorting direction for each column individually, and I don't think that'd be very tricky to implement, but people have been complaining for at least 8 years (e.g. in bug 86845) about needing to click on date fields twice every single time you temporarily click on another sort column and then back.  

If someone would be more amenable to quickly coming up with a patch to just add an about:config setting that could be toggled to globally set the default order for date fields to descending (and have the code that handles column clicks respect that), I would certainly be more than satisfied.