I have a lazy loaded screen with a panel that is sorted by a field that is included in the data structure, but it is not used in the screen section. The screen is displayed correctly when opened from the menu or by an action button. However when I want to open it following the blue link (CTRL + click), I end up with the following error:
Error: Panel 10c93cf5-ea79-4d6e-8926-4cabb2eff27a has default sort set to column RentingStartDate. This column does not exist in the panel. Cannot set default sort.
It seems to me that while lazy-loaded screens depend on the database for sorting, client-side sorting requires the field to be visually present on the screen in order to be used for sorting.
Opening a screen using Ctrl+Click from a combobox opens the screen with lazy-loading turned off, as the data are filtered to a single record.
After an analysis I have to say that it is quite strange to include a field that is not present in the UI into a sort set. Here are the reasons (both UX related):
How does the user know how the screen is sorted? There is no visual hint (an arrow on the column header)
If the user knows somehow and changes the sort to a different column, they have no way how to restore the original sorting because there is no column to click on.
In this case I suggest to set the sort on those fields that are visible, even though it works on a standard screen. Even there it does not make much sense and is only partly functional to the user.
Since you follow a link, there is always only one record, so in this case the sorting is irrelevant. Also if I remember correctly, in such a case the record is opened in form view, so no columns.
My comment was about the other screens where you CAN see more records. There it does not work for the user from the UX perspective. Technically it works but it is confusing.
The reason for this is that the field featured on the screen is an IsNull function call and the field used for sorting is the replacement value.
But you are correct that there is no visual manifestation of the sorting. However if a user changes the sorting to another column and then removes the new sorting, the original sorting is used automatically.
Are you sure that it reverts to the original sorting? How can one remove sorting, is that possible now?
Anyway from my perspective still the original sorting is wrong. The user must see the fields that the list is sorted by. Otherwise it makes no sense to the user because they cannot see why the table is sorted the way it is. So in your case I suggest sorting by the ISNULL(xxx, yyy) field because I suppose this is actually what the user expects.
I don’t think it is helpful. Going back to random sort does not really make sense. And if you cannot see by which field it is sorted, it is basically random to the user. It might be “obvious” that it is sorted by some field (e. g. Date) but if it is actually another field which is equal 95 % of the time, the user might miss some records as he is confused.