Can I sort a data provider from a custom component?

[Timmiej93]

I'm creating a custom component for myself, which is basically a pretty table with some functionality. One of those functionalities should be the ability to sort the table by clicking on the column header. I've got everything set up for this, but I don't know how to sort the dataprovider from code. How do I do that?

And maybe more importantly: Where do I find info about how to do stuff like this? I hardly get any results when googling for issues like these, and I'd really rather be able to find this kind of info by myself.

Update: I've managed to get the same result by sorting the data in javascript, leaving the dataprovider alone. Is that an acceptable way of handling this? Are there better ways, or is this intended to be done differently?