There are many areas of CRM where metadata lists are not sorted alphabetically, or seemingly in any logical order. I'm not talking about the inability to sort a PK o SSA field, e.g. the Assigned To column in the Opp's Pipeline list. The beginning user would expect that clicking the sort icon in the column header would cause the list to be sorted alphabetically by Assigned To, but of course that's not the output. You have to denormalize these types of columns, in your source views, and then add the text versions. All perfectly logical.
What I can't get around however is how a list of Saved Searches can be arranged alphabetically. This is not absolutely critical functionality, but it sure would be helpful. Reason: we support six different product lines, each with its own maintenance and support plan. So we need to report, by product line, those clients whose plans are expiring Next month, so we can proactively contact them about renewing their plan. We also want to see which clients' expiration dates fall either in the Current month or in the Previous month. So we have 18 Saved Searches total, three each - Current, Next, Previous Month - for each of the six products. It would be ideal if the list displayed alphabetically by name, e.g.:
- Expiring Current Month: Product A
- Expiring Current Month: Product B
- Expiring Current Month: Product C
- ...
- Expiring Next Month: Product A
- Expiring Next Month: Product B
- Expiring Next Month: Product C
- ...
- Expiring This Month: Product A
- Expiring This Month: Product B
- Expiring This Month: Product C
I understand the drop-down Saved Searches list is pulled from custom_reportsearches, however even when I go to the trouble of starting with a new report, and then entering the entire list in the order I want them to be displayed, CRM displays them in a randomized order. A SQL SELECT against the relevant rows, with an ORDER BY either the PK or the CreatedDate, shows the results in the correct order.
So, does anyone know how CRM is populating the Saved Searches list, and/or how I can force it to display the searches alphabetically?
Thanks.
- Graham
