So I've spent all day chasing around this issue for a coworker who was trying to help a client with a new report they were deploying to their system.

Now I learned a couple of things today because of this. Due to moving buildings, our new network completely broke our report server because the DNS can't resolve it's name. Since we're rewriting this system from the ground up, I haven't been majorly concerned about getting this fixed, but with this coming up, being persistent, I'm glad I figured it out. IT did give us a static IP for this VM, but they never bothered to add a DNS entry for it, so for the past couple of months, this hasn't worked for some reason, and now that's why.

So the root cause of my issue can been seen from 2 directions, the dev of the report, and the dev of the UI that reads it. The dev who wrote this code originally is checking very specifically for 'asc' and 'desc', meanwhile my mans who wrote the report has his order by with 'ASC' where he needs it.
(MAN, THE PREVIOUS DEV WAS GREAT)

I'm glad I was able to help him, but god damn, that took all day, AND TO FIND IT WAS A CAPTIALIZATION ISSUE, AAAAAAAAA FUCK ME