Sorting Column By DateTime Value Not String Value?

Question

I'm using this to sort a list view: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319401 It's working great, except when I try to sort a date column, it things 2AM comes after 10PM (since 2 is greater than 1).

4/7/2011 10:00:00 PM
4/7/2011 2:00:00 AM

This is the code I'm using:

var lvcs = new ListViewColumnSorter();
ListView.ListViewItemSorter = lvcs;
lvcs.Order = SortOrder.Ascending;
lvcs.SortColumn = 1; //<-Contains DateTime values in string format
ListView.Sort();

So how can I convert to DateTime and sort using the code above?

Answer 1

Look at the "Sorting Dates" section in this article - you replace the Compare method.

Example Code:

try {
    DateTime dateX = Convert.ToDateTime(listviewX.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text);
    DateTime dateY = Convert.ToDateTime(listviewY.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text);
    compareResult = ObjectCompare.Compare(dateX, dateY);
}
catch {
    compareResult = ObjectCompare.Compare(listviewX.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text, listviewY.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text);
}

Answer 2

The answer marked as correct here did not help me. My app seemed to go in to an infinite loop of thrown exceptions. To avoid using a try/catch and catching thrown exeptions, I used the following and it works perfectly:

DateTime dateX;
DateTime dateY;
if (
    DateTime.TryParse(listviewX.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text, out dateX)
    && DateTime.TryParse(listviewY.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text, out dateY)
    )
{
    compareResult = ObjectCompare.Compare(dateX, dateY);
}
else
{
    compareResult = ObjectCompare.Compare(listviewX.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text, listviewY.SubItems[ColumnToSort].Text);
}

Answer 3

You should get your items from your listview and convert the date/time strings to DateTime objects and then call sort on those objects (having put them in a collection) and then put them back into your ListView.

Hopefully that solves your issue.

Answer 4

above is correct because you are doing string comparison of list.

try to convert to DateTime and Create List<DateTime> and sort it then,

You can use DateTime.TryParse or ParseExact to specify you own parsing format