Hi Erik,

See my previous post. Yes, I could do that however by doing that it means I have to then explicitly define all other attributes/fields that need to be indexed as Shannon touches on briefly in his reply to the Github issue:

To have a field marked as sortable, you have to declare it sortable in the config, but by doing that it means that your index now has to declare all of the fields it wants to index explicitly which isn't ideal.

Thanks, Simon

Morning Erik,

I tried that yesterday and it seemed to have no effect, however, I've tried it again today but this time deleted the examine indexes first and have made some progress! It now sorts by nodeName and I've also added updateDate but I am missing the result scores still but at least this is a step in the right direction so thanks!

In case it's of use to others here is my implementation so far:

/// <summary>
/// Overridable method to execute when All resolvers have been initialized but resolution is not frozen so they can be modified in this method
/// </summary>
/// <param name="umbracoApplication"></param>
/// <param name="applicationContext"></param>
protected override void ApplicationStarting(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
{
    var externalIndexer = ExamineManager.Instance.IndexProviderCollection["ExternalIndexer"];
    externalIndexer.GatheringNodeData += Bootstrapper_GatheringNodeData;

    ((UmbracoContentIndexer)externalIndexer).DocumentWriting += Bootstrapper_DocumentWriting;

    var externalIndexerFields = externalIndexer.IndexerData.UserFields;
    var sortableStringFieldNames = new[] { "nodeName", "title" };
    var sortableNumericFieldNames = new[] { "updateDate" };

    foreach (var f in externalIndexerFields.Where(x => sortableStringFieldNames.Contains(x.Name)))
    {
        f.EnableSorting = true;
    }

    foreach (var f in externalIndexerFields.Where(x => sortableNumericFieldNames.Contains(x.Name)))
    {
        f.EnableSorting = true;
        f.Type = "LONG";
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Handles the DocumentWriting event of the Bootstrapper.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender">The source of the event.</param>
/// <param name="e">The <see cref="Examine.LuceneEngine.DocumentWritingEventArgs"/> instance containing the event data.</param>
private void Bootstrapper_DocumentWriting(object sender, Examine.LuceneEngine.DocumentWritingEventArgs e)
{
    // Add a new sortable field with the node name
    e.Document.Add(new Field("__Sort_nodeName", e.Fields["nodeName"], Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));

    // If we can't parse the field as a date we can exit here
    if (!DateTime.TryParse(e.Fields["updateDate"], out var updateDate)) return;

    // Create a new NumericField for storing our sortable date
    var updateDateSortField = new NumericField("__Sort_updateDate", Field.Store.YES, true);

    // Convert the date/time to a long
    updateDateSortField.SetLongValue(long.Parse(updateDate.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmssfff")));

    // Add our new sortable field
    e.Document.Add(updateDateSortField);
}

Then in my controller when I am performing the search I make sure to add the following to my query when sorting by the document title or name:

filter.And().OrderBy("title", "nodeName");

or, when sorting by updateDate I add the following:

filter.And().OrderByDescending(new SortableField("updateDate", SortType.Long));

Cheers, Simon

As I suspected then - thanks again Erik.