Sorting on full text columns in sphinx

Question

Hi,

I know you can sort by integer values in sphinx but is there a way I can get sphinx to sort by a text field alphabetically?

I want to search on first name and instead of sorting on relevance, I'd like to sort by the first name alphabetically. I know I can do this in mysql but in mysql I don't have features like stemming (as far as I know).

Thanks Everyone!

Answer 1

As far as I know you can't sort by anything other than attributes (and a few special attributes like @weight, etc.). Currently attributes cannot be strings, but this feature should be coming in 0.9.10 from what he's said about it.

http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#sorting-modes

Answer 2

You can use strings as ordinal attributes - Sphinx will collect all values of the given column, sort them alphabetically, then give the first one a value of 1, the second a value of 2, and so forth. This allows for sorting, but not filtering.