Posted by Richard Levasseur on 02/13/06 21:10

I often have this requested as a feature of the things i write.
I've yet to come up with a simple elegant solution.

Most often i simply hack it in. Pass a ?sort=name&dir=asc from a link,
store that in a session, and append a ORDER BY clause to all the
relevent queries.
It is a pain, but it gets the job done.

Other solutions:
Create a SortBy array and have each element an array of column name and
direction.
$sort[0] = array('col'=>'first_name', 'dir'=>'ASC');
Then implode it and concatenate it. Messy, but a quick fix if you have
a lot of subsorts needed.
Extending that, create a SortBy class, and append that into all the
relevent queries, propagating it through $SESSION.
$sort = new SortBy($col, $dir); $sort->addCol($col2, $dir2);
$query = "select bla bla $sort->toString()
This lets you easily manipulate the sorted direction and allows more
control over the sort. Basically the previous thing but with a
friendly interface you can reuse in other projects.

My only other solution is to abstract the query so that you can do
whatever the hell you want to it.
$query = new Query();
$query->Select($col1, $col2);
$query->SortBy($col1, $dir);
$query->toString();
Granted, that requires a lot of work, but is the easiest one once its
all said and done.
In fact, i think with the PDO objects you can do just that. I'm not
sure, though, I haven't really looked at those.

Finally, often enough they say they want sort, but they will never use
it. Really they just want to see specific results in specific ways.
I would say wringing as many details for reports as possible out of
them is a better way to go. Its easier for you to do, and they'll like
the final results better.

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