Sort order in catalog

[ckube]

We are building out our catalog (have not gone live with it yet) and it is fairly large with quite a lot of categories and catalog items.   I am wondering how you folks are sorting your catalog items within each category?   Do you do it alphabetically by name, some dynamic type of sort order, etc?   Details would be great.   I do realize I can use the order number field on each catalog item but it seems unrealistic to do that with such a large catalog - and having to maintain that with each new item entered, edited, etc.   Any advice, suggestions?

[Pradeep Sharma]

Hi Cindy,

I think the only way you can sort is with the help of order field on catalog item which you are aware

Please let me know if you have any questions.

[ckube]

Support mentioned that it could be controlled/ordered via a business rule, but I haven't attempted that yet.   I just can't imagine why it would be so difficult (or unusual?) to sort the catalog items within a category alphabetically.   That is why I was wondering what everyone else is doing.

[johnstettin]

We also have a rather large catalog and have found maintaining the order numbers can become rather difficult. To overcome this we created a business rule to auto re-orders the items on insert or update. This has proven to be extremely helpful for our admins and especially the users.

Table: Catalog Item [sc_cat_item]

When: After - Insert/Update

Script:

function onAfter(current, previous) {

    //This function will be automatically called when this rule is processed.

    gs.addInfoMessage("Please wait, re-ordering the Service Catalog");

    var gr = new GlideRecord('sc_cat_item');

    var i = 0;

    gr.orderBy('name');

    gr.query();

    while(gr.next()){

          gr.order = i;

          gr.update();

          i++;

    }

}

[tomas55555]

We have our catalog sorted by alphabet. But if there are items which you prefer to have on the top you can define the "order" and set them up like:

"-100" - first on my list

"-50" - second on my list

...etc.

Thanks to this you don't have to define an order for each item.