Sort Specification

The Sort Specification property for a business component, picklist, or predefined query orders the records retrieved in a query, and serves as the basis for the ORDER BY clause in the resulting SQL issued. An index needs to be present that supports the order specified in the sort specification. Otherwise, the RDBMS engine physically sorts the entire result set in a temporary table.

The index needs to include the base columns for all of the fields, and to use them in the same order. There can be more columns specified in the index than are used in the sort specification, but the reverse is not true.

For example, the sort specification Last Name, First Name in the Contact business component is supported by at least one index on the S_CONTACT base table. One of these indexes is called S_CONTACT_U1, and it contains the LAST_NAME, FST_NAME, MID_NAME, PR_DEPT_OU_ID, OWNER_PER_ID, and CONFLICT_ID columns, in that order. If you want a sort specification that orders contacts in first-name order, then you would need to create a custom index.

Do not sort on joined columns, because indexes cannot be used.