Symptom
The Ascending and Descending sorting of the Invoice ID field is not working as expected.
Environment
SAP Business ByDesign
Reproducing the Issue
In our example you have set up a document numbering rule for Customer Invoices with the prefix RE and the suffix as the current year (e.g. 2024).
Go to the Customer Invoicing work center.
Select the Invoice Documents view.
Show All Invoice Documents.
In the Invoice ID column select e.g. Sort Ascending.
The results are sorted as follows:
RE-1-2024
RE-10-2024
RE-100-2024
…
RE-109-2024
RE-11-2024
RE-111-2024
…
You expect them to be sorted:
RE-1-2024
RE-2-2024
RE-3-2024
...
RE-9-2024
RE-10-2024
...
RE-99-2024
RE-100-2024
etc.
Cause
The field Invoice ID us an alphanumeric field and combines alphabets and numbers. and is therefore alphanumeric instead of number (numeric).
Any alphanumeric sorting places the alphabets in order, and then the numbers in order by their first numeral, so 10 and 100 etc. will come before 2.
Thus, when you sort by Invoice ID, it is not following an ascending order of numbers but the described pattern of the alphanumeric sorting rule.
Resolution
This is the expected system behavior.
Keywords
Sorting; numbers; sequence; alphanumeric; numeric; characters; ID; , KBA , SRD-CRM-INV , Customer Invoicing , Problem