Apply sorting to the entire table

[Danila89]

According to this message sorting and filtering in vscode extension is only applied to the experiments under commit.
I'm using the extension as a leaderboard and it would be pretty convenient to be able to sort/filter the entire table.

[julieg18]

Filters were applied to commits in #4363, though sorting is currently only applied to experiments under commits.

[julieg18]

I'm using the extension as a leaderboard and it would be pretty convenient to be able to sort/filter the entire table.

@Danila89, do custom plots work for your use case instead of table sorting? You can use them to compare a metric/param across all commits and experiments:

Screen.Recording.2023-09-05.at.6.15.36.PM.mov

[Danila89]

These plots are really helpful, but it is essential for me to use some filtering of the experiments before plotting them. I didn't find the way to filter experiments before plotting them in the vscode extension.
Plots are nice in addition to sorting, not instead of it)

[julieg18]

These plots are really helpful, but it is essential for me to use some filtering of the experiments before plotting them. I didn't find the way to filter experiments before plotting them in the vscode extension.

Filtering experiments in custom plots would be simple enough to implement! Would that enhancement work for your use case or would table sorting still be needed?

[Danila89]

It is OK like a workaround (and a very useful feature by the way), but table sorting is also nice to have

[julieg18]

Did some research for table sorting and tried a couple ideas.

1. Flattening then sorting the table

By flattening the table and turning off nested rows entirely, we could sort all rows from biggest to smallest and vice versa. While I don't think this would be too hard to implement on the backend, we'd need to rethink how our table would look while flattened (how do we tell what row belongs to what commit/branch). This would require some design work and adjusting our table components to handle the possibility.

2. Sorting commits along with experiments

Commits would be sorted along with the experiments based on their largest (smallest could work too) value among its baseline values and its subrows' values. While this does make sorting more complicated (and probably performant since we need to parse all the table values), it is doable. I was able to get a working demo made pretty quickly. The demo is using the commit's and its subrows' max value to sort:

Screen.Recording.2023-09-12.at.11.28.09.AM.mov

3. Sorting commits and branches along with experiments

Branches would be sorted similarly to how commits are sorted in idea 2 aka max value among itself and subrow's values. I also think it's doable as well but would be a bit more complicated/performant than method 2 since now we're sorting through 3 row layers instead of 2.

What do we think? cc @shcheklein, @mattseddon