DEVICES display: fix sort by State field

The State field in DEVICES list view in Mac indigo client superficially behaves similarly to other fields and seems to support sorting. You can click on it. When clicked, it provides visual feedback that it is sorting by showing arrow pointing up or down.

Clicking actually DOES in fact cause the displayed order of devices to change. What it does not do is anything that could be called "sort".

At first, I thought it might be a case of there being an underlying device state and then possibly different UI representations of that state for different types of devices. For example, the state of a dimmer device might be 0. The displayed state of an on-off device might be "Off". The displayed state of a door sensor might be "Closed" or whatever. So perhaps sorting by State might cause multiple such different UI representations to be jumbled together when Indigo sorts/groups by their underlying state value.

However, when sorting by state, even if I look only at dimmer devices, for example, I see a group with dim level 0, then one with level 30, then a bunch more with level 0, So there is nothing like sorting happening here with the exception that I observe that devices without any state (state field is blank in the UI), do group together and toggling the sort direction causes the group to move to the top or bottom of the list.

What are some things that could be done if sort by State somewhat worked:

• quickly view the set of lights or appliances that are on
• group together a group of devices that are having problem communicating (e.g. displayed state is "no ack" or "device not found")
• scan a list of sensors such as temperature sensors in order by their values.

[jay (support)]

There is logic there, but it's much too convoluted and given that plugin devices can basically insert anything they chose into the state field, it's quite the mess to figure out. So it's already on the request list to sort out, just never gets very high on the priority list.

[matt (support)]

It sorts based on the device "type". So for example, all dimmers are grouped together. Live sorting by the actual state is confusing because the device order constantly jumps around as states are updated. If we made any change it would be to sort on device type and sub-sort on state but only when the sort header button is pressed. Not a super high priority though TBH, as we have some some big high priority features at the top of the list.

understood, however i would still argue doing something simple like brute-force sort on the displayed UI string value would be more useful than how it works now - since it would at least provide grouping by value.

It sorts based on the device "type". So for example, all dimmers are grouped together. Live sorting by the actual state is confusing because the device order constantly jumps around as states are updated. If we made any change it would be to sort on device type and sub-sort on state but only when the sort header button is pressed. Not a super high priority though TBH, as we have some some big high priority features at the top of the list.

thanks for the explanation, matt - it is helpful to understand how it works currently.