Posted by Jerry Gitomer on 08/29/06 01:47

Joe Molloy wrote:
> 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
>
>
Based on your description of the problem I would use the first
approach if the site owner frequently changes the desired
sequence. I would use the second approach if the desired
sequence is fairly stable.

But, before implementing either I would ask the site owner if
the order is based on some value that can be specified in an
ORDER BY clause, for example units sold or value of sales.

HTH
Jerry

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