[Now Implemented!] Sortable Views

[hawibtsync]

A minor wish: Sortable columns in WebUI and Windows Application.

[mbob]

Group/Filter/Sort the lists "Devices" and/or "Folders". Currently I have 15 folders synced between 9 devices (not every folder on every device), so the "Devices" tab gets a little bit unorganized. It would be great to be able to define sort order and also group the list either by device or by folder, so that it's e.g. possible to see all connected devices per folder, or all active folders per device.

Maybe this makes sense for the "Status" column as well: group by sync status: one group with synced entried, another group with unsynced entries.

[b0rman]

hi!

 

It will be great to have possibility to sort shares in webui - You may sort it same way on each server and it will increase usability

[estephen]

Mobile Client - Sort Files By Date Descending

 

Is there a way one could sort the files by date in descending (or ascending) order? Similar functionality as we see in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. Could add the option(s) to the "..." menu in the upper right corner.

[Moe]

Every column, wether it's in the WebGUI or the clients should be able to have the functionality to sort the share or what so ever after the content it contains.

Share -> A-Z

Size -> ASC or DESC

Status -> last synced oldest top or newest top

and so on

[ChrisFPol]

Hey you all,

 

I'd like the possibility to sort the folders in the my sync tab ...

[slawson2000]

I know I requested this somewhere a long time ago.  I am with Moe above.  Just click on the column header to organize by what column either acd or decnd.  Should be easy enough to implement, especially compared to some of the other requests I have seen.

[bencurthoys]

I just installed 1.4 assuming that it would *obviously* let you sort / search / reorder your folders, given that the major change seems to be a UI revamp. Surprised that it still wasn't possible, given how easy it would be. 

I've got about 40 sync folders at the moment (one per client, I'm using it to sync database backups off the servers and to the backup servers and share the backups with clients if they request them, so it does need to be that granular) plus half a dozen utility synced folders ("WebServer Utility", "SqlServer Utility", for easily moving files to an fro servers and keeping useful admin scripts in sync between servers), plus some for projects I'm doing for other people, plus some personal ones. 

And there isn't even a file which I can easily edit in a text editor that controls the order or the configuration. 

Feature Request:

Please let me sort and search the names of my sync folders. 
 

Or:

Give me an option to save the sync folder configuration in some kind of easily editable XML or JSON structured file so I can muck about with it.

 

Or:

Give me a way of structuring / grouping / tagging my list of synced folders

Edited September 12, 2014 by bencurthoys

[sdafgsdfg]

Hi,

My feature request is some basic sort options for the mobile versions of Sync. Right now it does alphabetical sort but it would be nice to have maybe date sort also.

[b0rman]

Hi!

 

Is it possible to sort shares (share folders) by name or size?

[pjank]

+1

 

If nothing else, I think for many of us it would make much more sense to display the folders in alphabetical order (based on the Name) instead of the order in which the folders were added (like it is right now). How about just a simple switch for that in the configuration?

[xtraeme]

First, I want to say BitTorrent Sync is a brilliant concept. A couple of years ago I was considering working on a distributed versioning filesystem using bep_0003 as the basis for how files were synchronized. So it's nice to see Bram is thinking along similar lines.

 

Anyhow, getting to the feature request, since files and directories are sorted using the native operating system's lister. I think BT Sync would be a lot easier and more useful to the end user if the client was more consistent in how it presents and sorts files on mobile devices.

 

Why is this important?

 

It is ridiculously tedious on the iPad scrolling through tens of thousands files to get to the bottom of the folder, just so I can finally click on the directory that I ultimately wanted to navigate to. Any photographer who takes lots of pictures knows exactly the sort of problem that I'm talking about.

 

It would simply just be nice if BT Sync was consistent and showed files in the file list the same way across all devices.

 

The Mess That Is File Listing and Sorting

 

To give a sense of how much of a jungle it is out there. Lets go through a couple examples to see how various operating systems pass folder-file lists to BitTorrent Sync.

 

Method #1 - iOS

 

BT Sync sorts files on the iOS first by:

 

{directory-file insensitive}

 

{numbers, A-Z first (case sensitive)}
{punctuation, a-z last}

 

Note: when I say punctuation I mean things like: [_-,.]

 

The iPad iOS lister, like OSX, doesn't distinguish between files and directories (I'll refer to this as directory-file insensitive) and intermixes the two as though they are the same thing.

 

Method #2 - OS X

 

On OS X, the files shown in Finder are sorted a bit differently:

 

          {directory-file insensitive}

 

{punctuation first}
{numbers, a-z last (case insensitive)}

 

This is a curious departure from iOS when you consider that under the hood iOS basically uses the character code (e.g. 0x31 = 1, 0x41 = A, 0x61 = a) to figure out the sort order. This means the developers, as a conscious part of the design, had to intentionally set character codes 0x5B to 0x60 to sort before 0x31. I suspect this was to make OS X more like Windows.

 

Method #3 - Windows

 

In a Windows environment files are sorted by:

 

{directories first}

{files last}

 

{punctuation first}

{numbers, a-z last (case insensitive)}

 

Method #4 - *NIX

 

Most *NIX environments list directories and files in a manner similar to iOS (for obvious reasons), but there are also differences due to how the locale is configured. In Gentoo, for example, the default unaliased 'ls' with LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8 will show:

 

{directory-file insensitive}

 

{punctuation [_-,.] is ignored because of LC_COLLATE, the first [a-zA-Z0-9] character is used}

{numbers, a-z first (case insensitive)}

 

By setting and running:

 

LC_COLLATE=C

ls

 

This gives results that are more or less identical to what we would get on the iPad or other iOS devices (method #1).

 

Of course we have more room for hacks on open operating systems (jailbroken / rooted android devices excluded since they are easily invalidated) because we can alias 'ls' and export LC_COLLATE to be what we want it to be.

 

Ideally I prefer getting as close to the Windows approach (method #3) as possible:

 

LC_COLLATE=C

ls -a --group-directories-first

 

Though unfortunately the 'C' codepage isn't case insensitive like en_US.utf8 and sorts using a variation on the method #1 approach that is directory-file sensitive (method #5).

 

{directories first}

{files last}

 

{numbers, A-Z first (case sensitive)}
{punctuation, a-z last}

 

Method #6 - Android

 

On Android 4.4 KitKat the sort function uses:

 

{directories first}

{files last}

 

{numbers, a-z first (case insensitive)}

{punctuation last}

 

And to think - there are even more permutations possible!

 

Ridiculous, huh?

 

How Do We Make This Easier?

 

In an ideal world users should be able to specify how they want to sort (name: A-Z ascending vs Z-A descending, etc.) and display (using the methods outlined above) their files.

 

Full customizability is a bit of work, of course. So for the time being an option to allow advanced users on *NIX-style OSes (iOS, Android) to go into the settings to specify the code page through LC_COLLATE and manually pass parameters to the API that retrieves the files list would be a nice workaround.

 

Bottom line though it shouldn't be so tedious to navigate through folders. Either a directory tree-view or search function is needed, file sorting by name / date / extension should be added, or something needs to be added to make navigation more efficient.

Edited November 26, 2014 by xtraeme

[chmars2020]

Clicking on the 'Name' column header doesn't result in an alphabetically sorted list of folders. It would be useful if folders could be listed in alphabetic order.

[mexter]

+1

 

This for me is an important feature. I use btsync to organize all of my devices pretty much all of the time, and it's a giant chaotic mess, particularly when I have to add one or redo one.

 

And anyway/ my life is disorganized enough.

[jake.sadie]

It would be great to be able to sort/organize shared folders in a number of ways:

• clicking on the column title to arrange in order
• click, hold, and dragging to rearrange
• grouping based on type (connected, syncing, available)
• probably other ways people care about

[Moe]

Additional: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/33236-individually-rearange-columns/

[jake.sadie]

Woops, sorry I didn't see your post. Glad to see I'm not the only one wanting that feature. Having folders sorted by the date they were added to my sync list (the way it is now) is a very silly restriction.

[Moe]

If someone is familiar with jDownloader 2.0 beta and knows how many different ways you can order the colums and enable and disable all kinds of columns - BitTorrent Sync seems so awkward compared to that.

[mexter]

Yes, please this! It's the one thing that really bugs me about every version of btsync thus far. I have quite a number of synced folders and it would help tremendously to be able to organize them in something other than 'most recently added at the bottom'

[GreatMarko]

Folks - the ability to sort your folder list in ascending/descending order by various columns has now become available with Sync 2.0!