The Tesseract Project

The Data Filters contain information about ordering. This is used by the Data Providers to sort the records they return. This is not a trivial task due to TYPO3's overlay mechanism (e.g. it is not possible to do alphabetical ordering on text fields for translations with a SQL query since one is supposed to query the original language and overlay translations afterwards).

Extension "dataquery" tries to be smart about this and guesses if a field is text or number. If it's a number it lets it be applied to the SQL statement. If not, it performs the ordering itself (in PHP) after overlays have been applied. This behavior is sometimes excessive as some number fields (e.g. date/time fields) may be different in translations.

It should thus be possible to override this behavior and in both directions, i.e. be able to force the ordering to be applied on the "source" (e.g. the SQL statement) or by provider itself (in PHP). The information should be in the filter.

I propose adding a property "engine", which would have values "source" or "engine". This must be described in the "tesseract" extension, and applied to "datafilter" (just make sure the property is transmitted properly) and to "dataquery" (for actual handling).