Posted by Joe Molloy on 08/29/06 00:28

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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