Why do our products appear out of order when viewed from different parts of the application?

Environment:

Administration / Products,Categories / Accounts,Groups

Issue:

Our products are out of order when viewed from different parts of the application.  In the Products table, they are listed alphabetically, but staff see a different order when viewing them from an incident.

Resolution:

When inconsistencies in the display order of standard drop down menus appear, this can be due to sequencing issues at the database level.  Symptoms of sequencing issues include:

a) Products or Categories are displayed in different orders when viewed in different areas of the product.

b) Values appear duplicated within the listing (i.e. groups and accounts).

To resolve this, please submit a service request to Ask Technical Support.  Please include a screen shot and steps to reproduce the issue.  Technical Support can then correct the issue at the database level.

Preventing sequencing issues:
Sequencing and ordering issues can occur for a variety of reasons.  The most common scenarios are where an administration table is locked by one staff member and another staff member overrides the lock and proceeds with making their own edits.  Another cause is by moving child records between parent records quickly (i.e. moving several staff accounts to different groups).  For sites with a large list of staff accounts (or any large table listing), moving multiple records quickly can sometimes cause sequencing issues.  

In general, these can be avoided by staff not overriding locks on tables and/or moving slowly to ensure the page is fully refreshed when making multiple changes within larger tables.