Using Playa field to order channel entries list

Question

I tried ordering a channel entries tag pair by a playa field (that is single entry relationship), like so:

{exp:channel:entries channel="channel_name" orderby="playa_field_name" sort="asc"} looped stuff goes here {/exp:channel:entries}

What I got was in some sort of order, but it wasn't alphabetical according to the titles of the related entry. I think it's sorting according to the information hardcoded into the database for that playa field, which would sort it according to the entry_id of the related field because the text in the database starts with the entry id in brackets. This is my theory anyway.

Surely I can't be the first person to run across this problem. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Probably the order is the order in which the relationships were created; this at least would be the case for the native EE-relationships. I assume with playa it is the same.

From the docs:

Ordering by a Relationship field will cause entries to appear in the order the relationships were made, not based on any content from the related entries.

Answer 2

The only way I can think to address this is to do some kind of post save processing to save a text string representing the title of the related entry to a custom searchable field. :/