Advance BI Publisher Concepts - Sorting in RTF Template

I am sharing a nice article on RTF template design written by one of our senior consultant Mr. Venkat from Adiva Consulting.

The objective of this post is to explain the “sorting” capabilities available in the RTF. Many might
already be aware of the standard BI Publisher syntax for sorting in the RTF template:

The above construct sorts the data by the VENDOR_NAME in ascending order – an alphabetic sort
is performed. However, what if the requirement was to sort on a number field. For example, if you
want to sort by the VENDOR_NUMBER, then the above will produce incorrect results as an
aphabetic sort would be applied to a numeric field. The following BIP construct can be used to
specifc the order and the sort type:

The above BIP construct performs a numeric sort on the vendor_number. That's rather simple to do.
Let's say we would like to sort on a field but the field name is not known at design time. The field
name exists in the xml data. Let's say the element P_SORT_BY specifies the field on which sorting
must be done. So, if the value of P_SORT_BY is VENDOR_NAME, sorting must be performed on
the field VENDOR_NAME. This can be acheived by using the following XSL:

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