I'm new to this list, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to post
this. If not, please direct me to where it would be better to post it.
Anyway, I'm creating a report generation tool of sorts in PHP for a
database. As part of this report generation tool, I'd like to allow the
user to reorder these results arbitrarily. In other words:
id | offer
---+------------
1 | Offer 1
2 | Offer 2
3 | Offer 3
could become
id | offer
---+------------
3 | Offer 3
1 | Offer 1
2 | Offer 2
However, I don't see any way of reordering the results arbitrarily,
short of creating a table that maps the id numbers to an arbitrary sort
order, joining them and doing an ORDER BY on the sort order numbers,
like so:
id | offer | sort
---+-----------+------
3 | Offer 3 | 1
1 | Offer 1 | 2
2 | Offer 2 | 3
The problems that I have with this solution are
--The sort order would be unique for anybody who uses the system, in
other words, one user may sort one way, and another user another way,
and perhaps simultaneously. I could fix this by using an additional
session identifier in the sort table, but that leads me to the next
problem...
--I'd have to garbage collect this data everytime I'm finished with it,
and since it's likely to only be used once for the actual report
generation and then discarded, it seems like a waste of effort.
So is there a way to make a query where I can sort arbitrarily without
having to create additional data in the database?
Thanks for your attention.
--
___________________________
Nathaniel Price
http://www.tesserportal.net
Webmaster
