Accumulative sorting in ADF 10g tables

Just what the title says.

In an application there were a few tables filled with results of some queries. I haven’t yet figured out why, but it was of a high importance to the client that all the tables had accumulative sorting (like the order by clause in SQL). This requirement took me a while to figure out how to implement, whilst the solution was quite elegant and pretty small to write it here.

So, there’s a table with results of a search (the query really doesn't matter as the entire sorting solution will be implemented in the view layer)

The whole trick is to set sortListener=”#{CustomersBean.onSort}” for the table. The backing code for this sortListener is found in the backing bean named CustomerBean.

And that’s pretty much it. The table is now sortable accumulatively: you can hit customerid first, then name, then surname etc. the resulting table will look similarly to what produces SQL clause order by customerid, name, surname, etc.
Hope this helps.