How to Apply Initial Multi-Column Sorting in Flutter DataTable?

In this article, we will show how to apply initial multi-column sorting in Flutter DataTable.

Initialize the SfDataGrid with the necessary properties. The DataGrid supports programmatic column sorting. You can manually define SortColumnDetails objects and add them to the SfDataGrid.source.sortedColumns collection. The DataGrid then sorts the data based on the SortColumnDetails objects in this collection. By handling this in the initState method, you can define a multi-column sort order that is automatically applied when the DataGrid is first rendered.

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();
    employees = getEmployeeData();
    employeeDataSource = EmployeeDataSource(employeeData: employees);
    //Initial-multi-column-sorting
    employeeDataSource.sortedColumns.addAll([
      SortColumnDetails(
        name: 'id',
        sortDirection: DataGridSortDirection.ascending,
      ),
      SortColumnDetails(
        name: 'name',
        sortDirection: DataGridSortDirection.ascending,
      ),
    ]);
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(title: const Text('Syncfusion Flutter DataGrid')),
      body: SfDataGrid(
        source: employeeDataSource,
        columnWidthMode: ColumnWidthMode.fill,
        columns: <GridColumn>[
          GridColumn(
            columnName: 'id',
            label: Container(
              padding: EdgeInsets.all(16.0),
              alignment: Alignment.center,
              child: Text('ID'),
            ),
          ),
          GridColumn(
            columnName: 'name',
            label: Container(
              padding: EdgeInsets.all(8.0),
              alignment: Alignment.center,
              child: Text('Name'),
            ),
          ),
          GridColumn(
            columnName: 'designation',
            label: Container(
              padding: EdgeInsets.all(8.0),
              alignment: Alignment.center,
              child: Text('Designation', overflow: TextOverflow.ellipsis),
            ),
          ),
          GridColumn(
            columnName: 'salary',
            label: Container(
              padding: EdgeInsets.all(8.0),
              alignment: Alignment.center,
              child: Text('Salary'),
            ),
          ),
        ],
      ),
    );
  }

You can download this example on GitHub.

Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed learning about how to apply initial multi-column sorting in Flutter DataTable.

You can refer to our Flutter DataTable feature tour page to know about its other groundbreaking feature representations and documentation, and how to quickly get started for configuration specifications. You can also explore our Flutter DataTable example to understand how to create and manipulate data.
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