setWhenOrderedBy: A Warning

Have you tried using setWhenOrderedBy in some 2.0 code recently?

If you have, it was probably extremely frustrating. This has come up quite a few times recently, so I wanted to issue a warning:

There seem to be some significant bugs with the setWhenOrderedBy API in SuiteScript 2.0.

If you’ve gotten it to work correctly, I’d love it if you could share your working example.

If you need to use setWhenOrderedBy but it’s just not working, you have a few alternatives, but none of them are great:

• Isolate the setWhenOrderedBy part of your functionality into a separate Script and use 1.0 for it; as far as I know the 1.0 version of the API works just fine
• Try loading a Saved Search instead of creating it in script to see if that bypasses the bug. I’m not sure if this actually works.
• Remove the setWhenOrderedBy portion of your search and do that grouping and sorting yourself. I recommend a utility library like lodash or ramda for this as they both provide excellent array manipulation methods.