value prefix data 64 98 referring to fig8 an embedded view 120 derived from the embedded view of fig4 shows the amount column 54 sorted in descending order in accordance with the preferred embodiment of the invention the above described getallentriesbykey method 114 results in a notesviewentrycollection which includes a count property that yields the number of documents in the result set 120 in this example there are 15 rows and the count property is 15 a notesviewentrycollection represents a collection of view entries of type document sorted in view order getfirstentry 110 getlastentry 116 getnextentry getnthentry 112 and getpreventry methods allow navigation to a set of documents 108 that are of interest since the document set is ordered as illustrated from rows 102 through 106 of fig7 they are sorted in the same order either ascending or descending and these methods and the count property provide sufficient tools to identify the set of documents from either the top 102 of the list or the bottom 106 for posting as view 120 back to the user referring to fig9 and 10 concatenation of data fields 54 56 for nested sorting in accordance with an alternative embodiment of the invention is illustrated in order to post back to the user a view in which a plurality of columns 54 56 are sorted in nested fashion a prefix value 76 may be appended to a concatenation of that plurality of columns 54 56 and then sorted as above along with column keys 78 144 and data 58 146.