Sorting preferences?

[Rich S]

Greets from the land of 100°F+ (38°C+) daily temps for months on end. Ugh.

I'm creating a runtime where it includes the typical address fields you'd find in most solutions: Street, City, State, Postal Code and Country.

To make things a little easier for end users I encoded the sorting scripts so if users sort by Country then the State and City fields are automatically sorted along with it; if the Country field is sorted in ascending order then the sort order is ascending for State then City as well; descending order...well, there's the problem: If Country is sorted in descending order should the State and City fields also be sorted descending or to make it easier to "grok", should the State and City fields be in ascending order?

...or...

Should City and State be auto-sorted at all, i.e., if the Country field is sorted then should the City and State fields fall as they may? I guess my question is: How much automation should be done for the user when it comes to sorting? I know that if _I_ were going to sort by Country then I'd sort by City and State, too, to make more sense out of the data being presented but that's just me.

Is there a "Best Practice" way of sorting?

TIA for your replies; I'm all out of sorts with this one. *ba dum dum*

[dansmith65]

I don't know of any "best practice", but you may want to search this site for topics on sorting best practice: http://filemakerstandards.org/dashboard.action

When I dealt with this same issue recently, I only sorted the primary field ascending/descending, and kept all secondary sort fields ascending all the time.