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Posted by Joe Molloy on 08/30/06 18:16
Well I bit the bullet and did it the second way - actually it worked out
alright as the rankings won't change too often and I used some javascript to
make it a bit easier to operate. Some AJAX drag and drop rows would be the
most intuitive approach here I reckon but that will have to wait for another
day.
For now I present the user with a list of the product names in each sector
and a correpsonding select list for each product with rankisgs from 1 to the
number of products. The user is instructed that the lower the ranking the
closer to the top of the display list the product will appear. As they go
through the list and select values I remove that value from all the other
select lists to prevent duplicate rankings As soon as they rank the first
product I display a button that lets them clear all the runkings. if they
click it then all the ranking select lists are reset to display all possible
rankings for each product and they can start the process again. In the case
were products were previously assigned rankings these values are preselected
in the lists when the page loads. If they make changes and then decide they
want to reset I have a javasctip funtion that simply requests the page again
from the server. Finally there's a button which commits all changes to the
database after checking that each product has been assigned a rank
That should keep them happy.
Thanks to all who made suggestions.
Joe
"Joe Molloy" <molloy_joe@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:RSLIg.13214$j7.326835@news.indigo.ie...
> Hi Group,
>
> I have a task and I'm interested to see what ideas people have here for
> the best way of tackling it.
>
> I have a table of products. Each of the products is associated with a
> certain section which is achieved with a foreign key (the section id)
> linked to the sections table.
>
> Now the problem is that when the products are listed in each section the
> order of their display is important - in other words, products should
> appear in a definite order when they are displayed - this order is not
> alphabetical or numerical so a simple ORDER BY clause won't work. It is
> just the preference of the site owner.
>
> I was thinking that there are 2 ways of achieving this.
>
> The first would be to add a timestiamp column so that I could order the
> list by the most recently updated product so that the site owner could
> manipulate the list into the order they want but that's not very user
> friendly.
>
> The second would be to have the site owner assign a numerical preference
> manually so that products could be ordered by that numerical preference
> column but that becomes pretty unfriendly with more than 10 products.
>
> I'm sure I'm not the first developer to have this kind of issue to address
> and I'd be grateful to hear how other people have tackled it.
>
> Looking forward to hearing your ideas,
>
> Joe
>
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