[Coco] sorting Delphi messages

[Roger Taylor]

I'm at the point now where a bunch of messages have been loaded into 
a SortedList which is a key-based dictionary/array that sorts 
automatically while items are added.
I'm tagging each message with it's Delphi-generated ID (found in the 
message header), and the message PARENT (optionally found in the 
subject line of the message header).

Both the ID and PARENT are stored in the list along with the body, 
subject, date, etc.  I then enumerate through the list which returns 
all the message IDs in ORDER from low to high.
I can check whether the message is a POST (has no parent), or REPLY 
(contains a parent message ID)

Here's where the work really comes.  I need a new sorted list that 
orders the keys by Thread Starter, Thread Participants


Original Post
   Reply to original
   Reply to original
   Reply to some reply to original
   Reply to reply #2 above
   Reply to #4 above
Original Post
   same list of replies and replies to those replies (if any)
Original Post
... etc.

Any messages that eventually lead back to the original post ID just 
need to be sorted that way in the new list so I can show them on the 
site to be Comments of the Original Message, with no nesting used.  I 
feel like the nesting levels may be too deep to make it worthwhile to 
recreate the entire thread depth visually.

Another issue is "the missing parent" syndrome since these archives 
are taken out of a slice of time.  Any message that points to a 
nonexistent parent should be remarked as a Thread Starter and the 
whole sorting process restarted.  I'm going to work on the missing 
parent thing tonight.

Out of ~1800 messages just for December 1993 of Delphi, you can see 
that no sorting can be done by hand.
Does anyone have a formula that comes to mind for finding all 
messages that ultimately lead back to the same parent?

Here is just a small cut of the debug readout I'm using to get a 
better idea of things.  The first message I have (by Delphi ID) for 
Dec 1993 is of course, something from a thread but not the master of 
the thread.  Any messages shown to be "a reply to #####" and the 
##### is less than 82350 is clearly leading to a missing message, so 
those have to be remarked as having a parent of 0 which makes it a 
Thread Starter now just to give the message a place in the WordPress 
blog scheme.

The list below is only sorted by message ID, not any considerations 
for threads.

82350: is a reply to 82331
82351: is a reply to 82309
82352: is a reply to 82342
82353: is a reply to 82345
82354: is a starter post
82355: is a reply to 82343
82356: is a reply to 82344
82357: is a reply to 82351
82358: is a reply to 82352
82359: is a reply to 82336
82360: is a reply to 82355
82361: is a reply to 82360
82362: is a starter post
82363: is a reply to 82359
82364: is a reply to 82326
82365: is a reply to 82306
82366: is a reply to 82306
82367: is a reply to 82362
82368: is a reply to 82363
82369: is a reply to 82315
82370: is a reply to 82342
82371: is a starter post
82372: is a reply to 82297
82373: is a starter post
82374: is a reply to 82310
82375: is a reply to 82312
82376: is a reply to 82371
82377: is a reply to 82340
82378: is a reply to 82376
82379: is a reply to 82342
82380: is a reply to 82378
82381: is a reply to 82371
82382: is a reply to 82375
82383: is a reply to 82371
82384: is a starter post
82385: is a reply to 82304
82386: is a reply to 82384
82387: is a starter post
82388: is a reply to 82382
82389: is a reply to 82384
82390: is a reply to 82373
-- 
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~ While I have seen Many annoying taglines over the years, I've never 
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~ Roger Taylor
~ http://www.americafedup.com