With the increasing integration of GIS and enterprise asset management systems, many organizations are storing unique asset IDs in their GIS feature classes. These IDs are often alphanumeric, consisting of a letter prefix followed by a numeric suffix (for example: AB123, GV5, or XYZ9283).
Currently, these fields are typically stored as text, which means they sort alphabetically rather than numerically. As a result, values are ordered like this:
GV1, GV10, GV11, GV100, GV2, GV20, GV22...
instead of the more intuitive:
GV1, GV2, GV3, GV4, GV5...
This makes it more difficult to browse records, filter data, verify asset inventories, find the last used ID, and quickly identify missing or out-of-sequence IDs.
It would be extremely useful if ArcGIS supported natural (alphanumeric) sorting for text fields, where consecutive numeric characters are interpreted as numbers rather than individual text characters. This behavior is common in many file explorers, databases, and software applications, and would significantly improve the usability of alphanumeric asset IDs without requiring users to redesign their numbering schemes or maintain separate numeric sort fields.
For organizations managing thousands of assets across multiple feature classes, this would be a meaningful quality-of-life improvement with broad applicability.
