Order by

The Order by operation allows you to sort the fields in your entities before performing transformation operations. This is useful for ensuring consistent output ordering or for preparing data for operations that depend on sorted input.

Overview

The Order by operation enables you to:

• Sort entities by specific field values
• Apply ascending or descending sort order
• Configure different sorting for different entity types
• Sort by any field available in your entities

Configuration

Entity-Level Sorting

The Order by operation is configured at the entity level, allowing you to specify different sorting criteria for each entity in your dataset.

For each entity, you can:

1. Select which field to sort by
2. Choose the sort direction (ASC for ascending, DESC for descending)

Sort Direction

• ASC (Ascending): Sorts values from smallest to largest (A to Z for text, oldest to newest for dates)
• DESC (Descending): Sorts values from largest to smallest (Z to A for text, newest to oldest for dates)

Examples

Sort Customers by Name

To sort customer entities alphabetically by name:

1. Select the customer entity
2. Choose "name" as the field to sort by
3. Select ASC for ascending order (A to Z)

Sort Orders by Date

To sort order entities by date with newest first:

1. Select the order entity
2. Choose "date" as the field to sort by
3. Select DESC for descending order (newest to oldest)

This operation helps ensure your data is in a predictable order before applying other transformations, which can be important for operations like limit that depend on data order.