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Have you ever wondered why when you do a search in Part Maintenance that you get results which precede the desired search criteria? For example, we have Parts which start with “RM”. We use the Starting At: filter and look for Parts that Start with RMA

This will return parts which precede A We have parts which being with RM- These parts are returned in the resultant search.

Shouldn’t we just see Parts that begin with RMA? PTS can help with this problem.

BACKGROUND:
This is a well-known pattern – String sort vs. Word sort and SQL collation (SQL collation will be discussed later in this article – it has the largest impact on the results). With String Sort all characters in the string have an equal weight for sort positioning – this is the Epicor Default as shipped. With Word Sort some characters, like a hyphen, have a reduced weight so that the order of the other characters is more important in the sort positioning – this is the Microsoft default. Multiple things are taken into consideration when sorting/comparing data in SQL Server (and many other platforms) including the collation setting, code page, binary/non-binary, unicode vs. ascii data, and client-side sortSetting.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT EPICOR CLIENT-SIDE SORTSETTING(EXAMPLE):
Below you can see the difference in sort positioning using the same set of values (everything else being equal):

String Sort:
1-1-A
1-2-B
1-3-B
10-C
11-A
12-A
13A

Word Sort:
10-C
1-1-A
11-A
12-A
1-2-B
13-A
1-3-B