(Photo: Roppongi District Desktop by powerbooktrance)

This was bedeviling me for awhile.  I could not figure out why my RQLQueryRange droplet was not sorting by dates correctly.  It turns out this is a known ATG bug which only happens when you are using Oracle, which is 99% of the time.

Considering that this bug has been open since 2003 one can assume ATG is not interested in fixing it.  This is probably because there is a simple work around.

Instead of using the sortProperties parameter, put the the sort directive directly in the RQL statement in the queryRQL parameter.

<dsp:param name="queryRQL" value="ALL ORDER BY creationDate DESC"/>