Sorting on text but ignoring the some characters

ALex/All,

I have text column declared as string which has data like this

ORACLE
MSFT
--
--


The "--" is there in the grid where there are no stocks in the column.
When I sort on this column then sorting looks like

--
--
MSFT
ORACLE

How to ignore the string or character like "--" while doing sorting..
So the actual data rows would always come like below

MSFT
ORACLE
--
--

or

ORACLE
MSFT
--
--


This is urgent issue in AW2.5.4 we implemented in production...

Thanks & Regards

You'll need to write a custom sort routine. I did something similar last year. This should help you -
var     obj    = new AW.UI.Grid
var     SpecialSort     = AW.Formats.String.subclass()
SpecialSort.create = function()
{
                var     obj     = this.prototype

                obj.comparator = function(values, greater, less, equal, error)
                {
                    return function(i, j)
                    {
                        try
                        {
                            var a = values[i], b = values[j]

                            if (a.indexOf("--") < 0 && b.indexOf("--") < 0)
                            {
                                if (a > b) {return greater}
                                if (a < b) {return less}
                                return equal(i, j)
                            }

                            if (a.indexOf("--") == 0)
                            {
                                return greater == 1 ? greater : less
                            }
                            return greater == 1 ? less : greater
                        }
                        catch(e){return error(i, j, e)}
                    }
                }
}
obj.setCellFormat(new SpecialSort, <column position>)
  Replace "<column position>" with the number of your target column.