Automatic sorting in month, weekday, and season columns

In newly loaded database schemas and uploaded files, the members in the month, weekday, or season columns are automatically sorted in chronological order, no matter in which order they are listed originally.

For example, in the month column, the sort order is January, February, March, and so on.

The automatic sort order is shown in the data tree in data modules, dashboards, and explorations that use the new file or schema as their source.

In the following example of an XLSX file, the month names are sorted in alphabetical order.

An example of an automatic month sorting with month names in alphabetic order

When you upload this file to Cognos® Analytics 12.0.1, the month names are automatically sorted in chronological order, and the Members display property on the Month column is set to Custom.

An image of the Properties window with the Members display property set to Custom

Note: In dashboards, the automatically generated custom sorting is different than the preexisting Custom sorting that is available in visualizations.

In a data module, you see that the Custom sort order is automatically defined for the Month column.

An image of a data module with automatically defined Custom sort order for the Month column

Values that are not defined in the custom sort are appended at the end of the list of sorted items.

You can modify the auto-generated sorting definitions. For more information, see Custom sorting.

Note: Automatic sorting is not applied to the month, weekday, and season columns in files and schemas that were imported in previous versions of Cognos Analytics.

Auto-generated sorting definitions are created for the locale of the user who uploaded the file or loaded the schema. For example, if a German user uploads a file that has the month columns for English, German, and French, the custom sorting is applied to the German month column only. The custom sorting definition that is shown in the data module, dashboard, or report, which use this file as their source, has values of the German months. The English and French columns do not have custom sorting defined.