How to Override a Value List Being Sorted in Ascending Order

[grantwood]

Hello,

I'm not referring to the options in the Sort Records dialog box. Hopefully, a simple example will illustrate.

Suppose I have a table called colorTable, with one field called colorField, and suppose I have the following three records in it:

red

green

blue

If I define a value list called "Favorite Colors" and base it on the values from colorField, whenever I choose to display this value list (perhaps as checkboxes), Filemaker will automatically sort the colors alphabetically, so I'll have:

blue

green

red

How can I override this default sort order without having to enter custom values in the Define Value Lists dialog box? I'm going to have about 20-30 lists with many items in each list, so I can better manage these lists by storing all the values in a dedicated table.

I initially thought of having a second field in colorTable called sortOrder, and specifying values like 1,2,3,.... It would be nice if, in the Define Value Lists dialog box, I could specify the first field as colorField, the second field as sortOrder, and then sort by the second field *without* displaying the values from sortOrder, but Filemaker 8 won't let me do that.

Do I have to use relationships, and define a sort order for each relationship? I was hoping to avoid doing that, since I would be adding 20-30 of them and I already have a crowded relationships graph.

Thanks for the help,

Sean