You might want to try the NaturalSorter transformer from the Hub. It offers the possibility to set a group -by which in your case is the ROAD_SECTIO_ID

@Nicholas

Sorting seems ok.

But u expect it to sort with the keys compounded.

In such cases I create a compound sort key.In this case csk is concatenation of the attributes.

You can also sort by tdist, aggregate by road_section_id and deaggregate.

Or counter by road_section_id and then use this counter as first sortkey (rather than road_section_id;

you would be replacing a string by a number)

Just to get some more info, what happens if you only sort on ROAD_SECTION_ID ascending? Do you get the expected result below?

10M

Yes, I I sort only on ROAD_SECTION_ID (Alphabetic, Ascending) then I do get the expected result as you describe.

Also, if I sort only on TDIST (Numeric, Ascending) then I get a proper result

0

0

0.01

0.01

0.02

0.02

and so on

My problem is when I attempt to sort on two attributes (first by ROAD_SECTION_ID, then by TDIST)

Hi @nicholas Are you reading from a geodatabase? If so then this problem with the Sorter was just recently fixed. Please try the latest 2019.2 beta from https://www.safe.com/support/support-resources/fme-downloads/beta/

Yes, I am reading from a file geodatabase.

I cannot upgrade to 2019.2 I need to maintain version parity with my workplace's FME server.

I will instead experiment with saving my dataset in a different format. Maybe a CSV or oracle database?

CSV will work. Let me know if you have trouble with an Oracle database.

CSV did work :-)

@danatsafe asked if my Reader was an ESRI file geodatabase, which it was.

I switched my raw data to a different format and my problem was solved.

@danatsafe also recommended I upgrade, but that is not a good solution for me (My workplace is using 2018.1 currently)