Recent N Documents Webpart for Sharepoint

Before I proceed, a great thanks to Jan Tielens and Robin
who tolerated me even in middle of night!!

Coming to the webpart...little upgrade that this guy has over Jan's SmartTools - WhatsNewWebpart v1.1 is that it gives configurable "Group By" property and ability to sort on columns(asc/desc)

So you must be thinking whats the deal about this thing.. its just another webpart that uses SPSiteDataQuery to get some recent data from document libraries like the Content Query Webpart. Well, yes it probably is and there is no rocket science involved here.

Only one problem here that i faced was "sorting and grouping together!!"..
Initially we get a cool "group by" in SPGridView but when you click on the grid's column for sorting is when things get a little awkward like this:



This started worrying me so much so that i almost forgot the most basic SQL thing there is:

always GROUP BY somecolumn ORDER BY somecolumn

Envisioning the above scenario, my GROUP BY and sorting (ORDER BY) were two different things that were not related and hence once i try to sort on any column, it damaged my group by
First i thought of doing the sorting in the CAML that is fed to the SPSiteDataQuery itself. But it started getting a little tedious thing as my SPGridView and the DataTable getting bound to the grid was getting generated in the CreateChildControl() event and the Sorting is a postback event of the control that happens after the CreateChildControl.

The logical solution i could see here was performing the group by and then sort by in the DataTable object itself and then binding the updated DataTable a little late in the control life cycle to the Grid..in OnPreRender for instance.

This obviously meant that i write some extra bit of code but it was not late that i discovered that Microsoft has already done that for us in DataSet Select DISTINCT Helper Class and CREATE TABLE Helper Class.

The Webpart can be found on my CodePlex Page