Hi Aldrin,
It's a bit of a long story but: due to
a) some long-standing known (and complicated) issues with treeview sorting that have never been funded to be fixed, and
b) how providing a natural sort (as opposed to ASCII-betical, like computers do by default -
see here for a good explanation of the two and the challenges in natural sorting) in an international, multilingual application can be very hard...
... the identifier-title and title sort options don't work properly in the sidebar treeview either, and we generally recommend users do not use them until the sort options can be overhauled.
So: though the option is there, both treeviews work best with a "manual" sort.
What does manual sort mean, in this case? As in, how is the full-width treeview sorted (and the sidebar one on manual sort)?
Essentially, sibling records are ordered in the order they are created - whether manually, or imported. So If you import a CSV of a fonds with 10 item-level descriptions, AtoM will progress row by row, and those 10 item level descriptions will appear in AtoM in the same row order as your spreadsheet.
Manual sort does allow for drag-and-drop between sibling records, so you can manually reorder your descriptions. Unfortunately, however, there is no bulk way to do this across all descriptions or archival units. Additionally, please note that while you can drag and drop in the treeview to reorder sibling records on the same level, you cannot drag them to a different parent - e.g. moving an item from one series to another for example. Instead, you would need to use the Move module for that. For both options, see:
This means that, for now,
- When creating descriptions in the user interface, you should either create them in the order you want them in, or drag and drop sibling records (e.g. items in a series) into the order you want when you are done creating them, before moving to the next series
- When creating descriptions via CSV import, you should make sure that the sibling rows (e.g. item level rows in a series) are ordered row by row in the way you want them to appear in AtoM
Sorry for the confusion and the inconvenience!
Regards,