My Requirement: I have this straight forward requirement of listing names of people in alphabetical order in a Indexed table view with index titles being the starting letter of alphabets (additionally a search icon at the top and # to display misc values which start with a number and other special characters).

What I have done so far: 1. I am using core data for storage and "last_name" is modelled as a String property in the Contacts entity 2.I am using a NSFetchedResultsController to display the sorted indexed table view.

Issues accomplishing my requirement: 1. First up, I couldn't get the section index titles to be the first letter of alphabets. Dave's suggestion in the following post, helped me achieve the same: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1112521/nsfetchedresultscontroller-with-sections-created-by-first-letter-of-a-string

The only issue I encountered with Dave' suggestion is that I couldn't get the misc named grouped under "#" index.

What I have tried: 1. I tried adding a custom compare method to NSString (category) to check how the comparison and section is made but that custom method doesn't get called when specified in the NSSortDescriptor selector.

Here is some code:

`@interface NSString (SortString)

-(NSComparisonResult) customCompare: (NSString*) aStirng;

@end

@implementation NSString (SortString)

-(NSComparisonResult) customCompare:(NSString *)aString { NSLog(@"Custom compare called to compare : %@ and %@",self,aString); return [self caseInsensitiveCompare:aString]; }

@end`

Code to fetch data:

`NSArray *sortDescriptors = [NSArray arrayWithObject:[[[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"last_name" ascending:YES selector:@selector(customCompare:)] autorelease]];

[fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:sortDescriptors]; fetchedResultsController = [[NSFetchedResultsController alloc] initWithFetchRequest:fetchRequest managedObjectContext:managedObjectContext sectionNameKeyPath:@"lastNameInitial" cacheName:@"MyCache"];`

Can you let me know what I am missing and how the requirement can be accomplished ?