Does anyone have any examples of using Rank in a formula? I can imagine finding it useful, but since it seems to be a specific data type (not a string, integer, bool etc.) then I can’t figure out how to use it…
Do you have any scenario in mind?
Actually, the question was triggered by this other discussion:
I figured that @Aram_Zadikian might be interested in returning the highest ranking vendor if there was more than one that had the cheapest price…
I also read this discussion page and wondered if a formula based on rank might provide the solution
I have a scenario which I’m trying to use rank for.
Given hierarchy like
Project → tasks
I noticed that tasks can be sorted within a project using drag&drop
Which I presume is based on rank.
I would like to get highest ranking tasks to appear on top of my task list to make sure that I do them first without going into project to see the order of completion.
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I have no idea if Rank works this way. But if not, a workaround could be to create a Field for “Priority” (or “Rank” or whatever) then create a Kanban board visualizing your Priorities, and you can drag between them to adjust priority. Then in Table view sort by Priority and you have a “do first” list.
The workaround works though we do calculate priority ourselves using complicated different weights.
Rank would be sufficient enough and consider that it’s already exists in the system I don’t see why it cannot be exposed to be used in formulas.
Any reason @mdubakov?
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A similar idea. I have a backlog prioritized by dragging the most important items to the top. I want to show the top 5 on the team’s Kanban board, so they can pick up one next.
A workaround is to assign priorities, but it’s extra manual work and not fine-grained enough. If I mark 15 items as highest priority (out of a hundred), they will not be ordered in any meaningful way.
Is the backlog shared amongst several teams? If so, does this mean that the top 5 tasks for one team may not be the same top 5 for another team (but globally, they exist in a ranked order)?
It’s for one team, but I may want to filter it. For example, the product owner prioritizes the backlog by rank, the team estimates the tasks. Now, the I want to show only the top 5 tasks that have an estimation.
What view did you imagine that the Team will use to view the top 5 tasks (that have been estimated)?
The reason I ask is because you mentioned a kanban, so i am wondering what the columns (and rows?) might be
The columns are statuses (though irrelevant for this use case), the rows are the assignees. You see on the board:
- all assigned tasks being worked on
- 5 unassigned tasks that people can choose from
Waking this thread back up again. I would really like to be able to use [rank] in formulae, if only to work around the issue in Allow explicit ordering by rank that if you sort on [some field] then items are not sorted on [rank] beneath that.
Do you have some examples of how you would want to use rank in a formula?
Well if it’s not possible to explicitly sort on it, then I could at least make a trivial formula field that exposes it, and sort on that. But it’s not accessible at all. It only appears if you try to make a field called “rank”, when Fibery tells you that is already taken.
Sorting on rank is the default option if no other manual sort is applied, so it shouldn’t be necessary.
Am I missing something?
Sorting on rank is the default option if no other manual sort is applied, so it shouldn’t be necessary.
That is the key part. There are lots of use cases where you want to sort on something else as the primary, then on rank.
For example, what if I’d like a Board view on an entity type with a number of Workflow states, want columns per Assignee (for example), but then want something more compact than applying the State as a row grouping. If I could ORDER BY State DESC, Rank ASC, then I could achieve a nice compact view on all this.
Or what if I have two entity types in a List view, and I’d like to ensure that one of the types appears wholly above the other, but then things are ordered by rank within the individual types? (I know I could make a Document and embed two List views for this use case, one of each Entity type, but that gives a somewhat different experience than I’d like.)
Sorry, I wrote it badly.
Sorting on rank is the default option after other manual sorting is applied (if any).
If you sort by State, then within a given state option group, the results will be sorted by rank.
We don’t currently have sorting by entity type, but this is an unrelated issue, no?
Sorting on rank is the default option after other manual sorting is applied (if any).
…
If you sort by State, then within a given state option group, the results will be sorted by rank.
My initial response to that is “that can’t be right” but it turns out that it is. 
So as a result I have now figured out the actual issue I am having, which is that if you sort by State (for example) then you cannot reorder the rank within that State by dragging-and-dropping, which gives the illusion that it’s not respecting rank order, when actually it’s just failing to update it on drag/drop.
I think that’s a bug?
It’s not a bug so much as a (desirable) feature that is not yet supported
Semantics. :-p The UI lets you drag, but not drop, which is surprising to users => looks like a bug to me. If you couldn’t drag things in the first place, it would look like a missing feature.
Anyway, we’d really like to be able to do this, regardless of what you call it.
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