A way to influence the order of menu entries?

[mdk_813]

Hi,
I've recently updated to the new public version 1.3.46 and I noticed that the order of my plugin entries in the menus has changed drastically.
Before, new entries would usually be located at the bottom of a menu so that when you add several new plugins that belong together at the same time they would also show up next to each other in the menu. But, now all this order is totally mixed up so that I have to scroll around much more.
How is the order of entries determined by the game? And is there a way to influence that order?

[Brody Craft]

Alphabetical orders

[mdk_813]

Are you sure? The alphabetical Order of what? The id, the title?
Because honestly, it I have entries starting with "R" that are listed before "P"...

[CommanderABab]

File and folder name alphabetical order. You can use "ordinal":number to place plugins in different menu places.

Use

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ordinal:-1

to place before default buildings. Use something like

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ordinal:5000

to place at the end.

[Lobby]

Yes, folders are read in alphabetical order now (before the update it was device dependent. On some devices the order was based on alphabetical order, too, but others used date or no meaningful ordering at all). Let's assume you have the following folders and files in your plugin dir:

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A/935.json
A/743.json
B/534.json
B/C/235.json

It's now ensured that json files are read in in this order:

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743.json
935.json
534.json
235.json

So the algorithm behind it works like this for a plugin folder p:
1. Read in all files in p in alphabetical order
2. Execute the algorithm on all folders in p in alphabetical order

I suggest that every plugin maker uses an own top level directory that identifies his work. E.g. for a file structure like this in my case:

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lobby/animals/animals.json
lobby/game of life/gof.json
lobby/ufo/ufo.json

However, the creator has the freedom to not follow this scheme



You can use ordinal as proposed by @CommanderABab. If you don't give an explicit ordinal value it will be set automatically based on the ordering in which plugins are read in. It's possible to combine ordinal with ordinal from to place items relative to others based on others id:

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"ordinal from":"$idofsomethingelse",
"ordinal":1

This code will place the item right behind the item of id $idofsomethingelse. It also works with categories.

[Josh]

Again, learned something new

[Lobby]

So I moved it into the documentation forum so it's easier to find.

[mdk_813]

Cool, thanks!