Randomize order of notes

Agents, Actions and Automation
1

I have a container with about a thousand notes. I want to randomize their order (at present they are in the order they were entered). Is there any way to do this? Thanks for any help.

2

Ok, there’s no random sort feature. But if you populated a Number-type user attribute with a random number—perhaps with several decimal places, to minimise possible value collisions—you could sort the container on that attribute (perhaps with $SortAlso as ‘Name’ in case two values are the same.

So we may make a stamp like so:

$MyNumber = rand()*$ChildCount(parent);

(by all means make a user Number-type attribute of a different name and substitute appropriately.)

The container we set to sort on “MyNumber” then “Name”. Or, via code:

$Sort = "MyNumber";
$SortAlso = "Name";

But you’ve c.1k notes and don’t want to select/stamp them all the time. So let’s add a stamp to apply to the container (you could use an edict for the container). For this, we’ll leave MyNumber alone and make a user Number-type attribute called ‘RandomSort’ (setting container $Sort to ‘RandomSort’ and not ‘MyNumber’):

var vList(collect(children,$Path));
vList.each(aNote){
   $RandomSort(aNote) = rand()*$ChildCount(parent(aNote));
}
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3

One approach springs to mind:

  1. Populate $MyNumber of each note in the container with a random number. You could do this with a stamp, or by creating a temporary agent.

  2. Sort the container by $MyNumber.

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4

Thanks to both Marks for elegant solutions. Amazing the number of things Tinderbox will do easily – I don’t know any other app that could do this so readily.

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