Magento 2 - Product sorting issue on category page using product attribute

Question

I made product attribute and assign it on of attribute set so that it will show in the admin product detail page. Based on this product attribute I sort the product collection on category page.

The problem is, I set the Catalog Input Type for Store Owner to Text field. I will have to set the numeric value against each product in order to sort the product collection based on this attribute. It works fine from 1-9 but when I increase the count more than 9 like 10, 11 etc it destroy the sorting. It may be because field type is not number type

Any help, experience and knowledge sharing would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Please try following way using custom plugin, so please add plugin code in your custom extension as below

/Vendor/Module/etc/frontend/di.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:ObjectManager/etc/config.xsd">
    <type name="Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ProductList\Toolbar">
        <plugin name="vendormodule_catalog_block_product_listproduct_toolbar" type="Vendor\Module\Plugin\Catalog\Block\Product\ProductList\Toolbar"/>
    </type>
</config>

/Vendor/Module/Plugin/Catalog/Block/Product/ProductList/Toolbar.php

<?php

namespace Vendor\Module\Plugin\Catalog\Block\Product\ProductList;

class Toolbar
{
    /**
     * @var \Magento\Framework\Registry
     */
    protected $_coreRegistry;

    public function __construct(\Magento\Framework\Registry $coreRegistry)
    {
        $this->_coreRegistry = $coreRegistry;
    }

    /**
     * @param \Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ProductList\Toolbar $toolbar
     * @param \Magento\Framework\Data\Collection $collection
     * @return array
     */
    public function beforeSetCollection(
        \Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ProductList\Toolbar $toolbar,
        $collection
    ){
        $collection->getSelect()->group('e.entity_id')->order('{YOUR CUSTOM ATTRIBUTE CODE} ASC');
        $collection->getSize();

        return [$collection];
    }
}

Please try and let me know if you get any issue.