Sorting problem

Anon

i have a problem...there are 3 columns in the database. they're name, date and assigned_by. i want to make a page to show each day, if a person is assigned a task by the same person, the hrs would accumulate. How should i sort this to make this work?

if i sort date then assigned_by, if there are entries in the database that goes ilke A, B, A in the assigned column then it will output the last A as another person. if i sort assigned by then sort date, then it would be 1 J, 2 J, 1 A, 2 A...meaning the date would jump around...what to do??

Anon

order by date,name,assigned_by

Do the summing up in the PHP script. Zero out the sum when assigned_by gets a new value.

Anon

But i'll need to have the name first because I'm making a table that has the names on a column. I loop have nested loops that loops thru the name->dates and in datess, I loop thru what was assigned to that person for that particular date..

Anon

If I understand your question rightly,

"SELECT assigned,SUM(hours) FROM table [WHERE any further conditions] GROUP BY assigned, ORDER BY assigned"

Ought to do the trick - maybe swap "GROUP" and "ORDER". There's not a lot of sense to ORDER BY date in this case because it would be ambiguous (which date?)

Specifically, what this will return will be

assigned | sum

A........| total of A's hours
B........| total of B's hours
C........| total of C's hours
etc.

In that order.

jacko

ordey by name,etc,asigned_by