Ordering records

Hi - wondering if anyone has tackled a 'nicer' way to order records in a list. I know I can create an order field, however it means editing each record to create the order.

Just curious to see if anyone has come up with a more elegant solution. I've seen AJAX tutorials on click/drag ordering items with save to mySQL, but though I'd check these forums first!

Many thanks

It depends what you mean by ORDER, do you mean order or RE-ORDER

If you just want to display the rows in a particular order, by orderid, by name or by date, then this is easily done by adding the ORDER BY clause into the SQL.

Once the page has been created and sent to the browser, the order is fixed, unless you use ajax.

Another approach is to use a spry dataset, (also uses ajax), which is well documented.

A further approach, (but it means refreshing the page), is to have the 'order by' determined by a form variable, and when the form is posted, use this variable in the SQL

Thanks for the reply Craig

Actually - I mean the user manipulating an order field in the table so they can change the display order of records returned.

In the past I have included in my forms an 'order' field where the user puts in a number. The records can then be sorted based on the numbers entered. Problem is a user doesn't want to have to go through each record to renumber if they add/delete something.

I've seen some CMS systems use a 'weight' value where items with less weight sink to the bottom and vice versa, but I think that is a little confusing.

I'm going to keep looking for some kind of way to implement this with ajax I guess.

have you see this thread:
showthread.php?t=9353

is this what you are after?

Yes. Exactly. Thank you so much.

This is why these forums are invaluable.