Hi, I was using the Clean Installer to find a culprit file that was preventing my game from loading, so tried the sort by date for the first time. What I found was that it sorted by day, month, then year. Since I was looking for files loaded in Jan 2007, that made it harder to find those files. Happily, I did manage to and now have a group of suspect files.

Is there any way to get it to sort by year month day?

I also wanted to mention that I was never able to successfully install 1.5.1.4 until I also installed Net 2.0. So if anyone still has that problem, try installing the newer Net version.

Could be because of regional settings for date and time display.. does yours normally display as 26/01/07 or 01/27/07?

Good question, but I'm not sure what settings you're referring to. Settings in Clean Installer or in XP? For example, files listed an explorer folder on my machine are listed as day month year. Month day year might make it easier since all January installs would be together, but they still might not be grouped by year. (Don't know for sure.)

Basically, regardless of the date format, it would be preferable for all 2005 installs to be sorted together, all 2006 together, etc. Maybe someone else could to do a sort to see what they get.

I checked English-U.S, against another format and it gets the date format from whatever Windows' regional settings are. It's a simple enough change to make but unfortunately I couldn't find any other way to get CI to sort them.

CynicalChick, thanks for your replies.

Perhaps, if there is a new release, this can be improved. It's still very useful having the date column for finding those problematic downloads. I couldn't manage my downloads without it.

Hi - gotta say, I wholeheartedly support twerplina's comment above.

CI is completely brilliant, and a real godsend - and my sincere thanks to the author for making it...

... but the non-working date sort (outside the USA) is a sad loss of one of the most potentially-useful functions. It would be really good to have CI date-sorting properly without having to modify one's XP regional settings (which causes havoc here, if I forget to put them back! LOL )

I may be wrong, but I think it's only the USA that uses Month/Day/Year display format for calendar dates, whereas most of the rest of the world (I think... certainly the UK and most of Europe) generally uses Day/Month/Year.

I would guess, therefore, that the author is doing the sort on the basis of the year, then the first two-digit pair, then the middle pair - ie, they're working with the 'parsed' DateValue variable, rather than the underlying 'raw' DateSerial variable type.

If I remember right (I'm a programmer myself, see), the DateSerial value 'underneath' these parsed and formatted DateValue values represents the number of days and decimal parts-of-a-day since a given fixed date (I think it's something like Jan 1st 1601 or similar, but you never need to know that when using them). Most date-sorting algorithms in Windows apps unfortunately need to work with this object-type, behind the scenes, in order to be internationally compatible (this is a regularly-occuring problem, you'll discover!).

When working with DateSerials, you end up dealing with numbers like 1234.12345, 1.0, 2.33544543 and so on, instead of date string-values ("25/10/2005", "02/03/1999", etc) - and all that needs to be done is to sort the DateSerial items in a collection in ascending or descending order, then format the output for display, using the other function. Net result - Windows does all the work for you... it's as simple as sorting the numbers 1.0, 1.1, 2.7545, 545.232 (to show oldest first) and 545.232, 2.7545, 1.1, 1.0 (to show newest first).

A quick Google for DateSerial and DateValue will show the programming difference in more detail (and some other names by which these variable object types go by various development environments:- strictly speaking the DateSerial object is known to the Windows OS as a Variant object, sub-type Date) - and depending on what CI has been built with (VB, C++, C#, etc) there is almost definitely a fairly easy-to-use in-built function which hopefully can help CI's author get at both types, and resolve the problem without too much work.

If I can be of any help, let me know here - I'll keep a watch on this thread, and will happily establish contact with the author directly if they need a hand.

Many thanks again for an excellent program which has been really useful and made the job of tidying up my otherwise indecipherable collection (read: heap! ) of Sims2 bits and pieces! Your work is highly commendable, and I'm really grateful for your efforts.

S2PCI was developer with C#, but the author has (as far as I know) left the community and no source code was ever released.

With regards to sorting, personally I prefer using the unix-like timestamps (number of seconds since 1st jan 1970, aka unix epoch) - then it's even simpler.