Ordering documents in Sanity

Question

I have a set of documents and I want editors to be able to choose the order they appear. I haven't been able to find any information about this. Is there a standard or built-in way to handle this in Sanity, or a plugin?

I could add a sortOrder field to the document but editors would have to fill in numbers. Inserting a document early in the list would mean manually incrementing each document after it.

I've tried creating a singleton document with a field that has type: 'array', of: [{ type: 'reference', to: [{ type: 'myType' }] }]. This does work but it seems like a workaround and doesn't make for a good editor experience. You have to create a new doc then go to this singleton doc and add it there too. It also seems to query more slowly.

Any advice? Is there already a nice way to do this that I missed?

Answer 1

Currently, your best out-of-the-box option is what you suggest: Create a singleton which has an array of references to the documents you want ordered. But as you point out, this will require new documents to be added manually in a separate context. Which amounts to a clunky user experience.

On the deep end of the pool, you could create a custom input component which allows the order be controlled from within any orderable document, but persists that order (automatically, under the hood) to a singleton.

If you end up with the latter solution, it would be totally awesome if you could share the result. There are several others who have been looking for a solution to the same problem.