Grouping & sorting

I've been banging my head against this for some time now, so it's time to post about it.
Why can't we group by something that's not sorted? This is making my life hellish at the moment, I'm curious if I'm missing something entirely.

Here is my situation:
I have a trivial grid with 2 columns, say type, name.
List goes like this:

type_A name1
type_A name2
...
type_B name11
type_B name12

etc.

I want to group on type and sort by name, but *NOT* sort by type.
Types aren't something that make sense sorted in either direction, only the creation order is the correct order for them.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks
Yves

Yes! I would love to see this as well. I think Grouping and Sorting need to be able to be separated.

I want to always have a certain column (possibly one that is not even visible) grouped. But the user should still be able to sort on any column - without changing the grouping. The sort would simply be applied per group.

The problem is, we need to sort by the Type column first in order that the different types are together. How would it work, otherwise?

It would still be a two column sort, sorting first on Type. There just needs to be a way to tell the grid that the first sort column is fixed (and no sort arrow displayed in the column header for it), and that when the user clicks on a column of the grid, it should only change the second sort column.

I think thats effectively what we are asking.

Ah, I see. We'll have to give this some thought. In the meantime, are you aware that implementing this in your host application is quite easy? You'd just need to turn off AutoSort for the column and set the sort yourself.

Actually, can you contact us through customer support so we can work with you to find the best way to implement this? I have some ideas I'd like to run past you.

I very much agree that having a different way of grouping would help a lot. There are a lot of situations where you need to group a list by certain types, but but not make that grouping dynamic so that any column becomes a type to be grouped by.

For instance, I have a situation right now where I have a list users that has columns for the user's status, name, and last known sync time. I want to be able to group them by their status (which is either online or offline), but not any of the other columns. However, I still want to be able to sort by the other columns.

To me, the perfect way to do this is how the standard ListView control does it. They have a "Groups" collection and each ListViewItem is assigned to one of those predefined groups. Is there any possible way of doing a similar thing in SandGrid?