1.6.8 Sortable Fields

The following guidelines detail how sorting fields should be formatted. It is important to note that the resulting values should never be shown to the public as a sorted list will utilise the full name of the value, but the sort field will be used to ensure that the ordering of the full names is as predictable as possible.

1. All search strings should use lower case letters rather than mixed case. This will ensure that IVES, ives and iVES will all be stored as ives and would be sorted in the same position.
2. All accented characters should be replaced by their unaccented characters. Therefore café would be stored as cafe and would both be equivalent in search terms.
3. All non-alphanumeric characters that are preceeded by an alphanumeric character should be deleted. Therefore the search form of R.A.C. would be rac, or ``pea-brain'' would become ``peabrain'', or ``duck! cover!'' would become ``duck cover''.
   The only exception to this is decimal points immediately after numbers.
4. All remaining non-alphanumeric characters are to be replaced by single space characters, unless doing this would result in an empty search string whereupon they may be left in.
   The only exceptions to this is:
   1. If the search string would become entirely spaces. if this would be the case then the non alphanumeric characters may be left in.
   2. decimal points immediately after numbers.
5. Multiple space characters should be dropped down to a single space character.
6. Common words should be moved to the end of the search value. Therefore the shining would have a sort value of shining the. This would apply to leading the. This list may be expanded in future.

While these guidelines are not enforced in the schema, it is a reasonable assumption that any given Consumer may apply the rules to incoming data before utilising it for sorting entries. You are therefore more likely to get consistent behaviour between Consumers of your data if you apply the guidelines in the IVES documents themselves thereby ensuring that the sorting will be consistent between Consumers who do and Consumers who don't apply the guidelines.