1st question: If I have a column that is a date or a year and I have that sorting by default, but then someone chooses to sort by another column and the dates are all in seemingly random order, is there a way to keep the dates in order as a secondary type of sorting when possible? I believe you can hold shift and select a second column, but is there a way to do this by default since I do not have my date or year column showing?

2nd question: If I have a column of years just inserted as a string, is there a way to order the filter menu in descending order? Our most recent years are the most important, so we would like to have them at the top.

The customer's solution was helpful, but only seemed to help with filtering, not sorting by other columns.. However, thank you for pointing me to that ticket. As for the order of the filter menu, is there another data type that would allow me to choose descending. In this instance, I'm only inputting the year: 2020, 2019, 2018, etc. I tried "integer" and that didn't change the options.

Thank you, Aleksandar. It is difficult for us to provide a temporary access login given our setup, but I do have someone here I can ask to update the database tables with the instruction you provided. Thanks again.

We checked the data type in the database and those two were not in there. It doesn't seem to matter if it is stored as a string or an integer as there does not seem to be a way to order the drop-down menu when we have it auto-populating from the data in that column. Can you provide instructions for us to customize the order of the menu to descending? It sure would be nice if this was a feature in the interface to choose ascending or descending for the menu items.

We came up with the following solution:

jQuery(document).ready(function( $ ) {
   $('#table_1').on( 'init.dt', function () {
      var list = $(".column-year").find("ul.dropdown-menu");
      var listItems = list.find("li");
      list.append(listItems.get().reverse());
   });
});