ServiceNow Not Honoring Sort By Sequence Number

[jmiskey]

I have a Record Producer which has a Variable that is a Lookup Select Box.  All the values are stored in the OOTB Choice table (sys_choice).  I am trying to make the values sort by the Sequence number in the drop-down box, but it is not working.  It seems to be ignoring it, and sort it by alphabetical order, no matter what I do.

First, here are the three entries in the Choice table:

And here is how I have set-up the Variable in the Record Producer:

And here is what I see when I select the drop-down box on the Service Portal:

I also have tried setting the "Variable attributes" property to "ref_auto_completer=AJAXTableCompleter,ref_ac_order_by=sequence" and tried leaving it blank.  No matter what I do, the options are always presented in alphabetic order, as shown above.

How do I get it to list these values in Sequence number order on the Service Portal?

Thanks

[Brad Bowman · Accepted solution]

The ref_ac_order_by attribute is used only for the typeahead search on a reference field/variable

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-platform-administration/page/administer/field-administrati... 

In your scenario, you can affect the order of the choices by adding this to the end of your reference qualifier

^ORDERBYsequence

[jmiskey]

Thanks.  That fixed it!  I find it odd that sort by sequence number is not the default (and alphabetic is), but am glad to have a solution.

[jmiskey]

Brad,

That worked great for the Lookup Select Box, but when I tried to apply the same logic to a List Collector using values from the Choice table, it did not work. 

What is the trick to get it to work in a List Collector variable type?

[jmiskey]

This old post seems to suggest that List Collectors cannot be sorted, that they all come out in alphabetic order, and there is no changing that.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/how-to-sort-list-collector-choices-as-per-user-...

Is that true?