Connect Dialog with "--showallservers" does not sort "Version" normally

[pljones]

Describe the bug

When the Client is run with --showallservers, the Connect Dialog shows all Servers supplied in the Directory server list response, regardless of whether they respond to a "ping" packet. This list now contains a field displayed as "Version".

In this mode, the Client allows sorting the server list by the columns in the dialog, including the Version.

To Reproduce

1. Run the Client with --showallservers in the command line.
2. Open the Connect dialog
3. Select a Directory, e.g. Any Genre 1
4. Make sure the dialog is wide enough to expose the Version column and that the Version column is wide enough to show the versions fully
5. Click the Version column heading to sort by version (ascending). This puts the empty values first (expected).
6. Click the Version column heading a second time to sort by version descending.

Expected behavior

The versions should be in "version sort" order rather than character set sort order.

Version of Jamulus

Jamulus 3.12.0beta2 (or anything after the Version column was introduced)

[ann0see]

@softins

[pljones]

Pretty low priority, to be fair.

[ann0see]

If possible, it should still be fixed for the RC...

[softins]

I've just had an initial look at this. It looks to be quite involved to do. The connect dialog list is a QTreeWidget, which is a simplified subclass of QTreeView using a predefined model. This model appears just to have built-in column sorting of the displayed text as ASCII up or down.

To fix the version sorting looks like it would require reimplementing the widget as a QTreeView and providing it with a custom model subclassed from QAbstractItemModel and hooking in our own sorting methods via that model.

That's something I don't have time to do at the moment, nor the detailed knowledge (I sadly haven't yet managed to get back into Jamulus coding since moving house).

[pljones]

https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/itemviews/qtreewidget.cpp#L830
The QTreeWidgetItem class overrides operator= already. The comparison for sort is done with instances of QTreeWidgetItem using their < and > operators:
https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/itemviews/qtreewidget.cpp#L662-L681
https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/itemviews/qtreewidget.h#L137C18-L137C26

So for the version, could we subclass QTreeWidgetItem?

[softins]

So for the version, could we subclass QTreeWidgetItem?

Maybe, but I'm not sure how you would then get the QTreeWidget to use the subclass of QTreeWidgetItem rather than the base. My knowledge of inheritance and polymorphism is very sketchy.

[pljones]

So for the version, could we subclass QTreeWidgetItem?

Maybe, but I'm not sure how you would then get the QTreeWidget to use the subclass of QTreeWidgetItem rather than the base. My knowledge of inheritance and polymorphism is very sketchy.

Yeah, not dug into how we populate the list yet...

[softins]

I've just had a long and productive conversation with ChatGPT, which has explained how to do it. I'll share the chat soon.

[softins]

This is the chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e05067-a540-8006-9028-ec026a48f029

It shows the evolution of the solution, and it looks like the end point will be the most useful. I haven't had time to try it out yet.

I find it amazing what ChatGPT can do!