URL query string convention for multiple sort

Question

I have a RESTful web application that supports multiple sort fields on a collection of items. Is there a common convention for encoding these sort fields into the query string o

Answer 1

I've done this before using the standard SQL sorting syntax. There are numerous parsing functions and techniques out there.

http://myapp.com/books?sort=author asc,datepublished desc&count=12

which would be encoded to

http://myapp.com/books?sort=author+asc,datepublished+desc&count=12