Date Sort in a DataGrid – the easy way

While trying to give suggestions to a post on the Flex Forum, I modified my Simple Data Grid to include a column for a Date. The poster had an issue with sorting the column with dates in it. My guess is, the Date value is actually a String object. It really isn’t very hard to create a Date from a string, just parse out the String and feed the appropriate date times into the Date object. Here is how I create the random date value.

// Create a Random Date
var randomMonth:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * (11));
var randomDay:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * (27));
var randomHour:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * (23));
var randomMinute:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * (59));
var thisDate:Date = new Date();
thisDate.month = randomMonth;
thisDate.date = randomDay;
thisDate.hours = randomHour;
thisDate.minutes = randomMinute;

Since I insert the value into the item Object as a Date object, the sort function knows how to sort for Descending/Ascending. It might take a few more steps to convert a set of String data into objects and insert them into an ArrayCollection, but I think it saves time in the long run, because you work with each value as what they are and not a String that you have to convert to a Number, Int or Date.

Here is the DataGrid example. Not only does sorting by the column header work for the dates, I added a button to sort by the dates. The button switches between Ascending and Descending each time it is clicked.
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About DeanLogic
Dean has been playing around with programming ever since his family got an IBM PC back in the early 80's. Things have changed since BASICA and Dean has dabbled in HTML, JavaScript, Action Script, Flex, Flash, PHP, C#, C++, J2ME and SQL. On this site Dean likes to share his adventures in coding. And since programming isn't enough of a time killer, Dean has also picked up the hobby of short film creation.

About DeanLogic

Dean has been playing around with programming ever since his family got an IBM PC back in the early 80's. Things have changed since BASICA and Dean has dabbled in HTML, JavaScript, Action Script, Flex, Flash, PHP, C#, C++, J2ME and SQL. On this site Dean likes to share his adventures in coding. And since programming isn't enough of a time killer, Dean has also picked up the hobby of short film creation.

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