How to sort a JS object of objects?

Question

I have built an object in PHP, used JSON_encode function and send it as a JSON string to my JS script via ajax. Then I convert it back to an object. The problem I am having is that I wanted to keep the object in the order that it was originally created in. Please see this picture of what the object looks like once I get it into JS:

When I created the object, it was sorted by the customer field alphabetically. The customer name starting with A would come first, B second, etc. As you can see, now, the first element of the object as customer starting with S. It looks like somehow it got automatically sorted by the key of the top-level object, which is an integer, so I understand why this happened.

So i want to do is re-sort this object so that all the sub-objects are sorted by the customer field alphabetically. Is this possible? If so, how do I do it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've changed Fabricio Matée answer to become more flexible and return the sorted object.

function alphabetical_sort_object_of_objects(data, attr) {
    var arr = [];
    for (var prop in data) {
        if (data.hasOwnProperty(prop)) {
            var obj = {};
            obj[prop] = data[prop];
            obj.tempSortName = data[prop][attr].toLowerCase();
            arr.push(obj);
        }
    }

    arr.sort(function(a, b) {
        var at = a.tempSortName,
            bt = b.tempSortName;
        return at > bt ? 1 : ( at < bt ? -1 : 0 );
    });

    var result = [];
    for (var i=0, l=arr.length; i<l; i++) {
        var obj = arr[i];
        delete obj.tempSortName;
        for (var prop in obj) {
            if (obj.hasOwnProperty(prop)) {
                var id = prop;
            }
        }
        var item = obj[id];
        result.push(item);
    }
    return result;
}

Then just call the function like this

your_object = alphabetical_sort_object_of_objects(your_object, 'attribute_to_sort');