One of my favorite organizational tools is Instiki. I use it for note-taking, maintaining reference information, and keeping lists. I have several lists that I keep in tables, and the other day I had need to make them sortable. Here’s how I did it.

The first thing you need is Stuart Langridge’s sorttable Javascript library. This is a library that allows you to make any table sortable, just by giving it a class of “sortable”, and a unique ID. It’s smart enough to figure out how to sort most kinds of data, so it will sort a date column as a date, and a number column as a number. Very cool piece of code. Anyway, take this Javascript file and put it in the the public/javascripts directory for your Instiki installation.

Next, start editing the page with the table that you want to make sortable. At the top add the following declaration:

<script src="/javascripts/sorttable.js"></script> 

Next we’ll modify the table. Usually tables in Textile look something like this:

 |ID|Name| |1|Joe Smith| |2|Susie Jones| |3|Bob Barker| 

We need to add a table declaration and associated modifier in order to give it a CSS class of sortable, and a unique ID:

 table(sortable#mytable) |ID|Name| |1|Joe Smith| |2|Susie Jones| |3|Bob Barker| 

The class name has to be “sortable”, but the ID (the part after the #) can be anything you want as long as it’s unique.

Save your changes, and you should now be able to sort by any column in your table.