I have a collection (let’s call it ‘A’) with a text field that has a few hundred items (and this will grow substantially). I have another collection (say, ‘B’) that has a reference field related to the text field in ‘A’. When I try to add a value to the reference field in ‘B’, the items from the text field in ‘A’ are in Descending Created Date order. I would normally be able to type in the value in the dropdown to get to select the item I need, but in this case I can’t as the text field is for a foreign language so I don’t have the right characters. So, right now, I have to scroll down through hundreds of items and hope to spot the item I need. This is crazy. Is there a way to have the dropdown for the reference field in the Content Manager in Alpha order? If I could do that I could find the item I need in a few seconds.
It is complicated since the value presented in the collection is not part of the collection.
The real value in this field is the reference item ID.
Behind the scenes, the content manager queries the referenced collection and display its primary field value. This query doesn’t run for all the items in the collection which can be millions of items. It only runs for the current page items (if you scroll down it will load the next page and query the referenced collection and so on. So sorting the collection by values that are not in the current collection may be challenging.
But you can ask for this feature.
https://community.wix.com/velo/wishlist
Firstly, thank you very much for replying, I really appreciate that. I understand exactly what you mean. Of course the foreign key is to the primary key of the child table. But they could certainly write code to query the table, then sort the returned collection and populate the dropdown with the stipulated sort. BTW, they already sort this by descending Created Date, as opposed to the ID, so they certainly could have, if they had wanted to, provide the facility to state the field on which to order it. I guess the bottom line is, they haven’t done that, and I suspect they won’t. But thanks for your reply J.D., at least it confirms it can’t be done with the interface provided, and I really appreciate you replying.