I've seen that Filemaker 10 has a sorting functionality for developers when defining tables and fields; it's a column with a double head arrow which can be used to do arbitrary sorting by drag n' dropping. Is this functionality available for developers to be used in own apps? I have a layout based on table view and i need to make arbitrary sorting of records available to users.

The option i'm using now is a numeric field for sorting, users put numbers to sort records as they want and Filemaker sorts according to this, but it's a bit difficult if table has more than 35-40 records.

In table view, records can be sorted by clicking the column heading. FMP does this auto-magically, no developer assembly involved.

In my experience, tables only ever need to be sorted by a couple of fields at most. Efforts to allow exhaustive selection of sort fields are usually unnecessary. Do some user testing to work out which fields the users *actually* need to sort with.

Indeed that auto sort functionality you mention is great, but here's how these records are sorted: some users input info about different events in a community, suppose they input in database 35 new records today, it's similar to news management; then an editor choose arbitrary 20-25 records to be printed in a report, the rest is ignored for printing but still stored; then from these 20-25 records, editor choose the printing order in report; How does he/she choose this order? as far as i can see is arbitrary, i think it's like a newspaper editor choose order for printing news, based on experience, available space, etc. That's why i asked for the drag n' drop function, because when using numbered field and auto sort, sometimes we don't get exactly what was intended, specially when list of selected records is longer.

Did you ever figure this out?