Sorting Field Collection Programmatically in Drupal 7

Question

How to change the order/weight of the items inside field collection programmatically when the node is saved? Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Already found the answer. I'm using hook_node_presave and then reorder the field collection array. Previously I was using hook_node_update and it didn't work.

Answer 2

This is a code snippet for sorting a field collection by any of its fields before saving the node:

 function your_module_node_presave($node){ if ($node->type == 'foo') { // We must sort by this field collection field if (!empty($node->field_to_sort_by)) { // Get the values of the sorting field. We must load the fc items for this. $items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_to_sort_by'); foreach ($items as $item) { $fc[] = field_collection_field_get_entity($item); } // field collection fields on nodes only contains 'value' and 'revision_id'. // We temporarily add the field to sort by, // for using the convenient uasort() function over the array. $tmp_array = $node->field_to_sort_by[LANGUAGE_NONE]; foreach ($tmp_array as $key => $item) { $tmp_array[$key]['sortfield'] = $fc[$key]->field_to_sort_by[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value']; } // Now we sort the node's field array using uasort(). usort($tmp_array, 'my_module_sortByField_asc'); // unset the sorting field before updating node's field collection foreach ($tmp_array as $key => $item) { unset($tmp_array[$key]['sortfield']); } $node->field_to_sort_by[LANGUAGE_NONE] = $tmp_array; } } } function my_module_sortByField_asc($a, $b) { return $a['sortfield'] - $b['sortfield']; }