I came across very the situation where I needed to sort some entity elements in a ContextStore.
Let say I had a very simple ContextStore of type XML with DataStructure and data in it like this
<ROOT>
<ParentEntity>
<ChildEntity Id="1" Sort="b">content</ChildEntity>
<ChildEntity Id="2" Sort="a">content</ChildEntity>
</ParentEntity>
</ROOT>
Very much appreciated would be to have the possibility to sort the context in workflow either in WF step or by having possibility to map SortSet to a ContextStore and sort the data at every MergeContext step of a WF.
Nevertheless I used a simple transformation to sort the ChildEntity elements by Sort attribute and used FullMerged output method of the transformation step.
Than I expected the records would be sorted as I send them to the context. In other words, I expected that FullMerge output method will erase everything from ContextStore and fill it out again with data I sent there exactly as it is.
Trace showed, that in transformation step MergeContext action happened and sent the data to the context sorted. But when I used immediately in the next transformation step the same ContextStore as input data it was not sorted at all.
It seemed to me that ContextStore somehow remembered primary Ids and mapped it as it was before, so in the end the original order of sorted elements was achieved.
But my question is, if this is correct behaviour or not? I think not.
Thank you for your answer.