D7 sort a view by a select list weight

Unless I am not understanding your question, your answer is within your question.

Use the Views "Sort Criteria" field. Or, you can use "group by", but you will have to Show your view by "fields" rather than "node".

You didn't state which version of Drupal and Views you are using. But, those options go pretty far back for Views.

G, in your select text field, prepend a number in front of the stored data:

Winter|1-Winter
Spring|2-Spring
Summer|3-Summer
Autumn|4-Autumn

Then you can sort on that field.

Views doesn't inherit the weight.

I'll write a plugin, it'll probably take me some time.

Just curious if you wrote a plugin or used another work around. I have a similar situation that I want to sort by a list, and I do imports via Feeds, so I don't believe that adding indexes on the list would help very much.

Thanks in advance!

Joel

I found three options for doing this, my preferred one first:

Use hook_views_query_alter. For defining an arbitrary sort order in views (also for list-type fields like "status", "priority" etc.), there is quite an elegant solution with hook_views_query_alter(): MPD's drupal.stackexchange.com answer for "How do you define an arbitrary sort sequence for views?"

Use numeric prefixes. The idea with using a numeric prefix to field values works, too (see) but is maintenance intensive if you have to add more values later or change their sort order.

Use taxonomy term weight. Another option (that I did not test though) is to make the field a taxonomy term field, and sort by taxonomy term weight. This becomes possible (without the custom module proposed above) by creating a relation to the taxonomy in the view, which makes the term weight available in the view's sort criteria) [source] . While this works, for large data sets this should be slower than the first two solutions above, since it needs more joins in the database. (But there's the option of view caching of course ...)