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Asked: 2026-05-23T23:33:20+00:00

I think I already know the answer, but I’m going to ask the question

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I think I already know the answer, but I’m going to ask the question anyway…

I have a table where I’m sorting rows by dueDate ascending. Some records have due dates, some don’t (nil). I prefer to show all the rows with due dates before those that don’t.
Example: Jan 1, 2011; Feb 1, 2011; June 1, 2011; nil; nil; nil

However, the default sorting puts the nil values first, as expected:
nil; nil; nil; Jan 1, 2011; Feb 1, 2011; June 1, 2011

I tried using an NSComparisonResult block in a sort descriptor and besides having some difficulty actually getting it to fire (probably due to some logic elsewhere – I am toggling different sorts in the same view), I can’t get it to actually compare the null key values to the ones with dates. I think this makes sense, as the managed objects whose @”dueDate” keys are null are more or less skipped over by the comparison for those where there are actually objects to compare.

At this point, I believe my only option is to hack through this and make the “no due date” records set to have a date far into the future, eg Jan 1, 3000. Anywhere that 1/1/3000 date might be shown, hide the value as if it were actually null.

Does this sound right and reasonable?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I solved this problem as I suggested in the above comment: [NSDate distantFuture]. So far it has been working in my app consistently, and I have no reason to believe it will stop working this way in the future… or even distant future.

    In places where I would normally use a nil value, I set the dat to distantFuture and filtered by that value as appropriate in the app.

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