Sorting eFilter and DocLister Items by Values from Another Table

Standard catalog sorting is easy when every sort field lives on the resource itself. Things get more interesting when ranking or rating data is stored in a separate table and depends on context such as the current category.

The scenario

A project stores per-category rating data in a separate table such as content_rating(id, category, rating) and wants eFilter plus DocLister to sort results by that external rating value.

What makes this advanced

• sorting data does not live in the main content row
• the ranking depends on the category context
• the filter layer and the list layer need to agree on the same dataset

This pattern is valuable because it shows how catalog logic often grows beyond the flat resource model and starts depending on joined or context-specific data tables.