Sorting bug in Bookpedia

[jenv]

Have 3 columns in your view of the books: Title, Author, Series. Select each of them for sorting, in that order. Author must be sorted by last name (option-click, I believe) rather than first character.

Have these 3 books in your view:

Author: Poul Anderson
Title: Alight in the Void
Series: <empty>

Author: Poul Anderson, Charles G. Waugh
Title: Time Wars
Series: <empty>

Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Title: 2001
Series: 2001

I expect these books to be sorted in this order:
Alight in the Void
Time Wars
2001

They are actually sorted in this order:
Time Wars
Alight in the Void
2001

It appears that when the "sort by the last name before the separator" option is selected "Poul Anderson" and "Poul Anderson, Charles G. Waugh" are not seen as having the same last name (Anderson) by Bookpedia. The latter always comes first.

[Conor]

I think you will find that series might not actually be empty for "Alight in the Void" it might contain a single space character.

[jenv]

I think you will find that series might not actually be empty for "Alight in the Void" it might contain a single space character.

It's easy to check for fields with space characters: go to Preferences->Auto Fill and do a Rebuild on the field. If there is a record containing said field filled with nothing but spaces, it will show up as the first one in the Auto Fill list. In this case, there isn't a hidden space.

I have seen cases where doing a multi-record clearing of a field leaves them filled with a space. Only if all the records started with the same data in that field, though. If they had different data in that field, that works. And you can't go to any of the individual records and press backspace to clear them either, the field shows as completely empty in an Edit window. You only know something is wrong when you Rebuild and see the empty entry as an Auto Fill value.