Sort By Expression Fails to Sort Properly if the Expression Concatenates Fields

It was reported that when a sort by expression included the concatenation of two fields, the table was not sorted as expected based on the expression.

Environment: Qlik Sense November 2018

An example can help illustrate this behavior: Inline load with 4 columns. The goal is to sort the table by the concatenation of Company and Description together.

Dept_simple:
Load * inline
[
Company,Department,Description,ID
AppleCo,6500,Zebras,1
CheckCo,6600,Yellow,2
BadCo,6700,Xray,3
AppleCo,6800,Wine,4
CheckCo,6900,Vino,5
BadCo,7000,UnionJack,6
];

The expression for the sort of the first column in the list is
=Company & ' - ' & Description

The expected result would be:

 

QLIK-93710 was closed by R&D as Working As Designed.

This behavior was reproduced by Qlik Product Support and a new bug was logged to request R&D to investigate the behavior. QLIK-93710
This bug was closed by R&D as working as designed. The fields can be concatenated by a similar expression in the load script and a sort by added to set the sort order in the load script to use that new column. But there are still issues with the sorting of that string based on the second part of the concatenated field. 

Adding the sort by in the load script changes if ascending or descending works properly with respect to the 2nd part of the column which contains the two other fields concatenated together. Without the sort by statement in load script: descending works properly and ascending does not. With the sort by in the load script, ascending works properly and descending does not.

There were only two ways found to fully workaround the behavior:

1. Perform the concatenation outside of Qlik.
2. Sort the data outside of Qlik prior to the data load and add a new column with sequentially increasing values to sort by in the load script.