Post by kevinrailway on Jul 23, 2024 8:03:41 GMT
I had this in our previous version of Fans of FNPrg, but it got lost when we moved here.
I have a number of magazines in BookCAT and I wanted to store them correctly, in order of Title/Year/Month.
So you enter the magazine details at the top as per Title/Year/Month and save that. Enter the next ones.
So I've entered
ABC 2024 January
then
ABC 2024 February
ABC 2024 March
etc.
But when we look at the list of magazines (assuming that a 12 month block is complete), there is a problem.
The list of magazine will actually show
ABC 2024 April
ABC 2024 August
ABC 2024 December etc.
BookCAT has sorted them alphabetically! Not exactly what we want and it's hard to tell if we have a full set of 12 for the year.
However there is a relatively easy fix. We reopen a particular record, then go into the 'Title Sort' box and change the month to a 2 digit code representing the month and save.
January becomes 01, February becomes 02, through to December which obviously is 12.
Now what you will get is the month sorted into numerical order 01 - 12.
ABC 2024 January (01)
ABC 2024 February (02)
through to
ABC 2024 December (12)
Which is the correct display.
I have one title magazine that uses months, but there is a catch, it comes out every 4 weeks, so there are 13 issues a year and the 'spare' is usually labelled 'Summer'. Apart from the publisher is selling an additional issue each year, it can still be included in my system correctly.
For the additional issue, I still call it 'Summer', but for it's month, I add it in between the months that it fits, usually June & July, sometimes it falls between July & August.
So in the 'Title Sort', I call it
ABC 2024 06A. That way it will correctly sort as
ABC 2024 June
ABC 2024 Summer
ABC 2024 July
If between July & August, it will be ABC 2024 07A.
All I've done is added an extra month to the Gregorian Calendar! 
Took me a little while to figure this out, I hope the tip helps someone. An advantage is that there is no need to rewrite any codes.
Kevin Martin