"Order by" multiple fields in prioritized order would be useful

[Kate Stewart]

In trying out the bug listing beta, I'm not seeing an obvious way to be able to have multiple sort orders apply. This is something I commonly do and generally have to resort to screen scraping into a spreadsheet and using the spreadsheet to help. For example: look at all the bugs by importance, and then sort within the importance set by the bug number (correlates to date received); also, order by importance, and then by status within importance.

Would it be possible to be able to arrange the "order by" elements, and turn multiple on at once? Something like L->R order of those turned on dictates sorting order displayed in the listing. or, maybe a number to use for the sort order?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

This feature was considered "Likely to have" in the LEP, but it proved tricky to implement in an intuitive way, so it was dropped. https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/CustomBugListings

[Kate Stewart (kate.stewart)]

WIthout this, dealing with reports that give 1000's of bugs is going to be painful.

One suggestion that would help is to preserve the prior sort order as much as possible. That way it could be partially done by clicking sort by's in order at least. ie. sort by status, then sort by importance. If the order of status bugs is preserved inside the importance it should help.

Ideally though a number or shuffling to give the order and allow multiple sub sorts would be good.