I struggle with relationships a little bit, but basically creating the relationship just links the two nodes via the node id used in the node reference field. Once that relationship is in place though you should be able to pull fields from the related node (such as the surname you mention) and then you can sort on it. When you add the surname it will ask you if you want to use a relationship with it.
The video in the first link below is a great primer and the second one goes into a bit more detail.
http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-views-relationships http://drewish.com/node/127
Anthony.
On 6:59 AM, Steve Kessler wrote:
I have a resource node type that references the author(s) of the post via a node reference CCK field. The authors are not necessarily still living or using the site so they are just an author node type that has nothing to do with Drupal users. We want to be able to sort the resources by authors last name that is stored in the node for the author.
Right now the node reference is based on title which is a concatenation of the title, first name, last name and suffix fields so it would be hard to write a regular expression to do this off of the title. We have examples of authors with and without middle names for example.
I was thinking I could just create a relationship and then sort on the relationship but I don’t see this as an option in views.
Thanks,
Steve
Steve Kessler
*Denver DataMan *
303-587-4428
Sign up for the Denver DataMan Free eNewslettter http://www.denverdataman.com/denver-dataman-e-newsletter-signup
"Getting the */right information/*, to the */right people/*, at the */right time/*"