Sorting and Ordering Explained

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Sorting and Ordering Explained

Developers migrating existing systems to the new Apollo engine do not need to make any special provisions for the new collation support in Apollo. Source code can remain as is.

The current version and previous versions of Apollo worked, and continue to work, with ASCII symbols only. That means that only ASCII symbols are sorted.

The real question developers need answered is what kind of sorting is now used. The answer is that Apollo now offers support for several different sorting styles. The default sort order is linguistic (i.e. simple alphabet) in accordance with the current locale set on the Windows system. Other locales may be set as the default sort order, including the well-known DOS ASCII value order, which is also called 'machine' or 'machine collation'.

Apollo now supports several common sort orders including ASCII, Duden, International and ETEC. Each of these sort orders can be set via the new global variable called ApolloEngine, which is defined in ApolloEngInt.PAS. See the source file for additional details.

Previous versions of Apollo did not fully provide support for different languages due to the lack of correct linguistic sort/insertion/deletion for Windows ASCII data in the first place. Apollo now features full collation and sorting and includes several built-in rules such as the ability to add Duden or ETEC collation rules. Apollo even adds support for user-defined sorting rules. Each of these rules and sort settings can be manages with the new TApolloEngine class found in ApolloEngInt.PAS.