@dae: At the moment the only persistent sorting criterion across reviews in Anki is the note creation time (note id/nid). At some point you mentioned that you might add an additional identifier so that note creation time and sort order are two different note properties in the future. Maybe you could keep this possibility in mind when designing the new import/export code so that the new code is not designed in a way that prevents you from ever adding such a new note property/feature.
In general such a property should be useful, e.g. after buying and using a deck from @basiskarten and then resetting it (because you didn’t study for some months …) you wouldn’t be able to get back to the original order he made (as far as I see). It’s the same if you want to share some of your notes with other people and before exporting/sharing you added some notes to make your idiosyncratic notes more useful for other people. …
I can only second what @ijgnd wrote regarding the implementation of a sort order value besides the creation date. Being able to sort cards in your collection is something I get asked about regularly and it would indeed be very useful.
While we are on the topic of importing there is another issue I would like to raise: Quite a few of users have trouble interpreting the current notification that appears after importing a new deck:
They often aren’t sure whether cards were imported or not.
They can’t easily find the newly imported cards or decks. To my surprise quite a few people don’t know that you have to click “+” in order to expand the decks in the main menu.
They are frightened by the HTML code. (I think just seeing something that looks like code makes many untechnical people check out and not really read the message in front of them.)
To improve the user experience I would like to propose the following changes. Maybe we could implement them as a plugin first. I’d even be happy to pay for this.
Improvements
Mention the number of imported cards as well as the number of imported notes.
Make the message easier to understand, for example like so:
Currently:
Notes found in file: 50
Notes skipped because they are already in the following collection: 50
My idea:
The file “Strafrecht_AT_2021-06-08.apkg” contains 50 notes (or 210 individual cards). 35 were successfully imported into your collection (show). 5 were updated to the latest version (show). 5 were not imported because they already exist identically in your collection (show). 5 were not imported because their note type has changed (show).
Insert clickable links (“show”). When clicked, the respective cards are then displayed in the card browser.
Add a button “Show imported decks”. When clicked the newly imported deck is highlighted in the main menu.
The scary import log with all the HTML code should not be visible directly, but only when you click on “Details >>>” (similar to what some install dialogs do).
Maybe even replace the HTML log with a table with the following categories:
Status (Added/Identical etc.)
Content
Show (= button)
Improvements
35 were successfully imported into your collection (show).
5 were updated to the latest version (show).
5 were not imported because they already exist identically in your collection (show).
5 were not imported because their note type has changed (show).