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Sort order changed in Membership.csv

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 10:15 am
by RossEvans
FYI, there apparently has been a small change in the content of the Membership.csv export file in some recent release of MLS.

The change, which is probably quite benign, affects only the sort order. Previously, the file was sorted by the "HofH ID" field, then the "HH Order" field. Now the file is still grouped by household, but is apparently sorted by the "Full Name" field of the head-of-household, then the "HH Order" field.

This makes the file more friendly for direct human browsing, and most likely will not affect external applications that consume this export file programatically.

But just in case anyone has built anything dependent on the ordinal positions of the old Membership.csv, beware. Further, if some process did resort the table somehow and needed to replicate the sort order of the Membership table as-exported, that would be easy to do in a relational database but difficult to do in a spreadsheet.

Either way, it is nice to know these details. Since the export files are not documented, this stuff needs to be reverse-analyzed.