638863 - Order attachments automatically when bulk-added to message

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[F. Ehrhardt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 3.1.7

Reference: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229224

Real-world justification of enhancement request: sending multiple image files. Problem / limitation: when you do this, the files are ordered randomly in the message, so any desired sequence of images (based on filename) is destroyed. Would it not be better, when user adds >1 file attachment at a time, to order them by filename and not randomly? 

Thank you.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Compose message
2. Drag & drop >1 file (e.g., *.jpg) to attachment pane
3. Note random order of attachments

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

I also saw phenomenon you saw many times.
MS Win looks for me to pass file names in radom order.

[Steps to reproduce, using Sakura Editor(text editor, availble at sourceforge.net]
1. Open Sakura Editor window, type some text
2. Drag&Drop files from folder file list of Windows Explorer on Win-XP.
     file-1.xxx, file-2.xxx, ..., file-N.xxx
   Sakura Editor opens dragged files in new editor windows by this operation,
   in passed order.
   => Opened file in new editor windows is random, in each test.
It may be relevant to "order of my previous window close", but I'm not sure.
It may be "last access time order" or "order in cache of Win for something".

I believe application's behavior should be "to process files in passed order".
If improvement is required, I think it should be one like next;
 a. Option of Win to pass files in file name order upon Drag&Drop.  
 b. Option of Tb to process files in file name order upon Drag&Drop.  
 c. Capability of Tb to sort or change order of attachments at attachment pane.
IIRC, enhancement like c. is already requested.
I hope MS Win already has option of a., as hidden registry setting for many developers.

Comment 2

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

I'm reasonably sure that the order that files are dropped into Thunderbird is totally non-random (but also totally non-obvious). Generally speaking, the first file in a drag-and-drop operation is the one you dragged directly (e.g. if you have 5 selected files and you click on the second one to drag all of them, that's the first file). There are probably other rules to this, but you get the idea.

You should be able to see the exact same behavior when dragging and dropping between folders in Windows. One you drag into a folder, the newly-created files will be in some strange but predictable order, and as far as I can tell, this is the same order you see in Thunderbird.

As for issue (c) in comment 1, that's bug 229224, which is currently painful to work on as listboxes aren't really well-suited to drag-and-drop reordering (getting autoscroll to work in them is annoying). I plan to revisit that bug after doing bug 630759, which will make my life considerably easier.

Comment 3

[nicholas_j]

Here is the - not at all optimal - behaviour that I see (on Thunderbird 78.7.0 on Windows 10). If I drag three files (PDFs) - all at once - from a Windows File Explorer window, in which the files are ordered automatically, the files end up in a seemingly random, and certainly not alphabetical order, in the email.

Comment 4

[JN]

Can we get a 'confirmed' status for this bug report?

Also: the bug matters. For, to attach a series of files entitled, say, 'handout 1', 'handout 2', 'handout 3', 'handout 4', 'handout 5' and to have them added in random order is counter-intuitive, creates work for the user (who, often, will feel the need to re-order the attachments), and - as a consequence of those things - irritating. Moreover: for someone who attaches many a file, this irritation keeps on irritating.