[isarl]

Your comments are both full of helpful suggestions – thank you both very much!

Originally Posted by theducks

Why not just move the subtitle column to be next to Title? No need to bloat the DB (performance hit).

Title follows the sort order scheme in ID: title_series_sorting
A calculated column does not have a tweak.

BTW Preferences:Look&Feel:Book Details (sidebar) is where you also do this to get the details to be the same order

1) Sure, could do. This is a matter of personal taste – I like keeping the parts as separate metadata but displaying them as a single field.

2) Always good to know about more tweaks, but in this case I'm happy to leave it on library_order.

3) This is very helpful too; I used this feature to hide the Title and Subtitle fields from Book Details and put my composite column in their place before any of the other fields.

Originally Posted by chaley

The option to have a second template for sorting is difficult. Fetching the value of a column is done without knowing what use will be made of it. Changing that would require deep changes in the calibre db layer, and I can't say with confidence that it would work well even with the changes. It is definitely not worth the effort for me.

No worries, I appreciate that just because a request is able to be simply phrased, that doesn't mean it's always trivial to implement.

Other than @theducks suggestion, you could:

• Use title_sort instead of title in your template. Of course you would see the altered title, but that might be OK.
• Use the "Sort by" action to construct the multi-column sort you want, title then subtitle. Save this sort for later recall. I think it should offer any saved sorts in the main menu. I will look at whether this is feasible.
• Use Action Chains: make a Python code action that sorts the way you want. Give it a keyboard shortcut. Example:
  

  def run(gui, settings, chain):
      # Enter you code here
      gui.library_view.multisort((('title', True), ('#subtitle', True)))

  True means ascending. You could make two chains if you want to sort both ways.
  
  Here is the chain definition. Not much ...
  Attachment 201116

1) Nice, simple suggestion. Since I'm mostly using this for aesthetic purposes I prefer not to take it, but that doesn't undercut its simplicity or relevance.

2) Oh my gosh, there's a Sort By action. Which now lives on my search toolbar next to Saved Searches and Mark Books. (For anybody reading who didn't know you can customize your toolbars and menus, see Preferences > Interface > Toolbars & menus. I chose “The buttons on the search bar” to which I added “Sort by”.) This is perfect, exactly what I needed. I can sort by Title > Subtitle and I can save the sort as well, totally independently of my custom composite column.

3) This is great and with Action Chains I guess its usefulness is only limited by one's creativity. Nevertheless, Sort By solves my issue so well that this would be overkill for me here, but it's still very informative.

Thanks again!