hi kevin,

thanks for the reply. one of the more compelling reasons to attach a button to a query is so that button and its code gets carried through the labkey UI wherever that query shows up without needing to build and maintain the UI associated with embedding a QWP in an html page. the latter solves the problem in one situation and it is quite easy in labkey user the user to be taken to some other page that might show your query (ie. anything using executeQuery).

it still seems that faking the user action of applying a sort really ought to do the same thing i'm trying to do. when you apply a filter or a sort, the dataregion does refresh. that is initiated by client-side JS code.