TBSORT Sequence Question

[agredell]

I'm not fully understanding how TBADD and TBSORT work. I created and loaded a table, only to find when I processed the table that it was in the reverse sequence of the order in which I loaded it. I added a "colno" key to the previous key (before it), and issued a TBSORT in my program. The order is alphabetically correct, but not numerically, i.e., "1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, ..., 19, 2, 20, 21...".

Is there a way to declare a variable numeric? Or a way to persuade TBADD to add AFTER the current position (that's how I thought it worked!).

Thanks!

 

[agredell]

Cancel that response, silly me, I looked more closely at the command and found the "N" attribute to add after the sort column! It's working fine now.

 

[JeremyNicoll]

A related point is if you store, say date() values in one column and want to be able to sort on date. I used to do that by also having columns that I'd never display to a user, and keep a date("B") value in those. To sort by date I sorted the latter column.