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needimport: Sort the imported needs using natural sort order #82
Description
Hi,
I would like to propose an improvement for the "needsimport" directive, so that the imported needs are naturally sorted.
Based on the current sphinxcontrib-needs version (0.3.10), needs having the ids= NEED_1, NEED_2, ... NEED_11, NEED_12 will be imported as follows:
NEED_1, NEED_11, NEED_12, NEED_2
though they are stored in the right order in the json file.
Activity
danwos commentedon Jan 20, 2019
Thanks for reporting this great idea.
But honestly I have no clue how a naturally sorting can be implemented, as the need-id can be everything. I think the way a sorting algorithm should work depends deeply on the project itself.
E.g. in one of our projects we have REQ_A_1.2, SPEC_A_1.2.1, SPEC_A_1.2.2.
Maybe we could allow the registration of a self-written function, so that an author could implement every possible sorting. But I'm not sure if this use case is really common.
I suggest a workaround here: Use needs-id-regex to force the authors to use numbers with 3 digits.
So NEED_1 must be written as NEED_001. The already implemented sorting should work as needed now.
danielbacara commentedon Jan 25, 2019
My use case is to automatically import the requirements from a database to sphinx, using the directive needimport. This works very well. I really like the sphinx-needs.
Furthermore I already sorted the json file so that, the needs are naturally sorted in the file. The problem is when the json file is loaded by the needimport directive. It re-orders the needs IDs from the json file.
If there would be a configuration to keep the order this would also work.
Otherwise also your idea of providing a user-function will work.
danwos commentedon Jun 22, 2021
Okay, looks like the sorting is already kept.
I think the problem was based on Python 2.x, which does not guarantee to keep the sorting of a dict.
As far as I know Python 3.x does.
As Sphinx-Needs dropped support for Python 2.x, this problem should have been solved automatically.
This a is an important proof that time safes all problems ;)
🔧 Import sphinx-codelinks into the workspace as packages/sphinx-codel…