[Qgis-user] feature or bug

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/06/2012 09:05 AM, M.E.Dodd wrote:
> When looking at the attribute table I want the first column in numeric order (they are the reference number of a set of features and I want to match by this column in a spreadsheet to other data and if they are in order this is easier, can do it without them being in order but more of a pain).  Thought I had tried this and it worked fine earlier with just a few features but now that I have entered nearly 1000 features it has decided that it won't sort and save.  Well it will sort if I click on the column head but then when saving the shapefile the .dbf is not in numeric order, instead its in the order that I digitised the data.  Have tried this several different ways and tried adding extra dummy features and saving again and with different filenames but still they appear in sorted order in the attribute table but then not in sorted order when you look at the .dbf.  Also you can sort, do the 'save edits', then close that screen and reopen it and they will be unsorted again. 
 Not entirely sure if this is supposed to happen or if it is a bug.
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This has to do with the way a shp file stores the data to begin with,
once the order is set it's not easy to change since it's also the order
matched to the shx and shp portions.

That said though you don't need to do the matching yourself, the Join
tool in the properties of the layer will take care of find the matches
as long as the same key exists in both your attribute table and the
table of additional data you want to add on. Note: I think this tool
currently works for csv or dbf files, so save your additional data into
that format with your spreadsheet app.

Thanks,
Alex