How a Business Component Sorts Records

A sort specification is a property of a business component that imposes a sort order on the records that Siebel CRM returns to an applet that references this business component. For example, the Sort Specification property of the predefined Account business component includes the following value:

Name(ASCENDING), Location

This value configures Siebel CRM to do the following:

• Sort account records according to the account name in ascending order.

• If the name is the same for multiple accounts, then it sorts the records that contain the same name according to the Account Location.

A sort specification includes the following qualities:

• If the Sort Specification property is empty, then Siebel CRM returns the records in the order that they occur in the table.

• If a predefined query exists, then it might override a sort specification that is defined on a business component.

• If Siebel CRM runs a sort on one of the following fields, then a sort specification can result in a negative effect on performance:

  • A field that references a join

  • A field that references a new extension column that is not indexed

  For more information, see Siebel Performance Tuning Guide.

• Siebel CRM displays empty records at the beginning of the result set.

• Siebel CRM cannot sort a calculated field.

• You can sort values in a static list or a pick applet differently than how the default sort for the underlying business component does the sort. For more information, see Creating a Sort Specification for a Static List.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Determining How a Business Component Sorts Records

• Guidelines for Configuring How a Business Component Sorts Records