[People] Sort Students in People List: Course

[yang_gong]

@people list is alphabetical by last names, which is not helpful. Please add sorting function by "First Name", "Section", "last Activity" and "Total Activity". All other tabular lists should be sort-able as well.

Add Group to the columns and Sort by group is needed as well. Jan 26, 2018 @kristine Hansen @dale Anne Davidson

Profile Picture	Name	Login ID	SIS ID	Section	Role	Last Activity	Total Activity

The sorting function has been available in Proctorio Exam Results for a while.

When will the Canvas development team pay their attention to this as a production priority because an overall sorting function is required for ALL tabular lists in Canvas!!

[RobDitto]

Voted! I've just linked to this from the page in https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/cold-storage?sr=search&searchId=ff745450-669a-4947-b115-636e1...‌ for the previous submission of this idea, which gained 48 votes.

[kimberly_a_smit]

Thank you for this submission. The absence of sortable columns - while not a bug - is an annoying lack of forethought and is a daily inconvenience. 

[James]

 @RobDitto  also linked to this feature request from the Course Roster Enhancements page, which is a blog about some Canvancements that I wrote a long time ago.  The blog is in need of updating to make it clear what works and doesn't work any more and Greasemonkey doesn't really work right now, so people should use Tampermonkey. The PDF stuff doesn't fully work but the roster sorter still does.

Here is a link to the GitHub site that holds the code. There's a two-step quick install (one step if you already have Tampermonkey loaded) there that's a lot easier to wade through than all the documentation in the blog.

For those who don't know, what that script does is add the ability to click at the top of any column in the roster page and sort by that column. It's a tri-state click, cycling between ascending order, descending order, or back to original order. It even parses the date and amount of time that a student has spent in the class so that it can sort by that column (that is probably locale specific).

Nothing I wrote here is intended to diminish the feature request or say that it shouldn't be a part of Canvas. Canvas could write it and support different languages while I'm locked into English. I'm just offering this as a possible work-around until Canvas does something about it. Note I wrote the code back in September 2015, so it may be a while before Canvas does anything with it.

[cms_hickss]

 @yang_gong ‌, could you maybe add the tag of "course" and maybe a comment about this being the People Page/List in a Course because at first I thought this was for the Admin People List/Page. These changes, plus the word "Course" in the title, may help draw more teachers to your idea. And you really are looking for teacher use cases for this idea.

I will say this though, that the People Search for the admin side that is currently in Beta does have the ability to toggle/sort by different columns and order (ascending/descending).

[ProfessorBeyrer]

 @yang_gong  Thank You for submitting this idea. It is so awesome that there are power users to develop these kinds of tools "until Canvas does something about it." I'm glad the openness of the platform allows the best of its users to show what can be done and especially that  @James  works at a school that uses Canvas.

[christy_b_turer]

Voted. Thank you!

[kristine_hansen]

I agree and have voted. We would also find it helpfull if we court sort all tables by "section" and "group". For example would it be very helpful to sort the grade-table by group if you have group-assignments. The alphabetical sorting is not helpful in this situation.

[davidson_399]

Thank you for getting this out there for a vote. A non-sortable list is useless and has been one of my biggest pet peeves since we adapted Canvas. It would also be great if an email could be generated directly from the people list or group list. Hopefully, sorting can be quickly be added. 

[aimee_rust]

If possible, I'd like the student names numbered. It would make data reporting much easier!

[sworrell]

I really need to sort a course by sections (periods) in either the people or gradebook views. Anyone know how to do this? Thanks