Associated (grouped) product sorting

Question

I have several grouped products and cannot determine what is determining the sort order of them in the catalog view. Here are 3 examples:

ID      SKU                         Description                                                 Price       type
6899    PUBINSURANCEESSENTIALS      Insurance Essentials                                                    grouped
6900    PUBINSESS2011               Insurance Essentials (Print)                                $65.00      simple
6901    EPUBINSESS2011              Insurance Essentials (eBook - PDF Format)                   $45.00      downloadable

ID      SKU                         Description                                                 Price       type
11317   PUBHISTORY                  A Tedious Brief History of Insurance                                    grouped
11316   EPUBHIST1EPB                A Tedious Brief History of Insurance (eBook - EPUB Format)  $15.00      downloadable
11315   EPUBHIST1PDF                A Tedious Brief History of Insurance (eBook - PDF Format)   $15.00      downloadable
11314   PUBHISTORY2015              A Tedious Brief History of Insurance (Print)                $25.00      simple

ID      SKU                         Description                                                 Price       type
8062    PUBNETINCOMERISKMANAGEMENT  Net Income Risk Management                                              grouped
8063    PUBNETRISKMGT12             Net Income Risk Management (Print)                          $45.00      simple
8064    EPUBNETRISKMGT              Net Income Risk Management (eBook - PDF Format)             $35.00      downloadable

But, they show like this:

I'm not sure what it is that is causing them to be sorted the way they are. I'd like them to all be sorted the same way. Any ideas?

Magento v1.4.0.1

Answer 1

It is on the Associated Products edit form:

Answer 2

This answer is based on Magento 1.9. (Since I don't have a copy of Magento 1.4) But still this might be helpful to figure out the cause for your issue.

Carefully look at the function located in Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Type_Grouped->getAssociatedProducts() which actually returns the associated product collection.

 public function getAssociatedProducts($product = null)
    {
        if (!$this->getProduct($product)->hasData($this->_keyAssociatedProducts)) {
            $associatedProducts = array();

            if (!Mage::app()->getStore()->isAdmin()) {
                $this->setSaleableStatus($product);
            }

            $collection = $this->getAssociatedProductCollection($product)
                ->addAttributeToSelect('*')
                ->addFilterByRequiredOptions()
                ->setPositionOrder()
                ->addStoreFilter($this->getStoreFilter($product))
                ->addAttributeToFilter('status', array('in' => $this->getStatusFilters($product)));

            foreach ($collection as $item) {
                $associatedProducts[] = $item;
            }

            $this->getProduct($product)->setData($this->_keyAssociatedProducts, $associatedProducts);
        }
        return $this->getProduct($product)->getData($this->_keyAssociatedProducts);
    }

And there are two possible ways of overcoming the above issue.

(1). Override the above function and sort associate product collection as you want

This link might help you on overriding the model http://inchoo.net/magento/how_to_override_magento_model_classes/

(2). At the time when associated products are loading in front-end sort them on-the-fly

Find the block associated with rendering these child products and sort the collection there.