[EuiInMemoryTable] onTableChange returns inconsistent sort.field property

[qn895]

If we change the sorting of an InMemoryTable, the sort.field is an id. But if I change pagination setting, the resulting sort.field is now using the column’s name instead. I can replicate this with sandbox on EUI 46.1.0. Here's link to sandbox to reproduce.

Screen.Recording.2022-01-31.at.14.51.46.mov

[thompsongl]

This looks like it was intentional at some point:

eui/src/components/basic_table/in_memory_table.tsx

Lines 404 to 415 in 5804943

	// EuiBasicTable returns the column's `field` if it exists instead of `name`,
	// map back to `name` if this is the case
	for (let i = 0; i < this.props.columns.length; i++) {
	const column = this.props.columns[i];
	if (
	'field' in column &&
	(column as EuiTableFieldDataColumnType<T>).field === sortName
	) {
	sortName = column.name as keyof T;
	break;
	}
	}

It doesn't make any sense to me to return name if we have field, though, unless it was preventing a breaking change. Simply removing the code above resolves the discrepancy, but surely (re)introduces some other edge-case bugs.

@chandlerprall do you have any context here? This code is a couple years old.

[cee-chen]

It appears to be an intentional architectural decision to store sortName as the display name / ReactNode internally and not the sortField ID, but the fact that pagination returns column.name and not column.field is a bug/oversight - reportedSortName up above (which is what gets returned to the onTableChange callback) needs to be overridden and return column.field if it exists. I poked at this and have a fix that I believe should work, I'll open a PR shortly.

[chandlerprall]

@chandlerprall do you have any context here? This code is a couple years old.

Looks like Constance found the right thread to follow, but context for that snippet is that it enabled sorting of computed columns, introduced in PR #2044 to solve #2012