Changing order of items in a list box?

RussWright

Hi all

Trying to figure out if it is even possible.

I have a table called modules with 3 fields:
id, display_order, description

id is a unique identifier, display_order controls the sort order and description is just a text field. I want to create a simple interface using PHP to change to order of the items.

So, using PHP can I have a list box of items, change the order of the items, and then save them back to a table ? Is there a better way?

Regards
Russ

eoghain

You shouldn't care how the data is stored in the table. Ordering of your data should be handled externally.

So if you want your data to be listed alphabetically by the description you'd use an ORDER BY description clause in your select query.

Or if you want to order by your display_order just put it in the ORDER BY clause. But you can't rely on how the database stores the information since it'll do what it feels is best for it's speed and the like.

WebRuss

Maybe I'm not explaining this well

lets say the modules are currently
Module 1 Apples
Module 2 banans
module 3 peaches

The user wants these to display in another cutomized order..

Module 2 bananas
Module 1 apples
Module 3 peaches

I need to create in interface, if possible to allow the user to change the order of the data.

Is that better? 🙂

Regards
Russ

irishprogrammin

Have a page that pulls each of the possible options into a query.
For each option, display a text box with the current "order_number" (editable) and then the "module_name" (read-only) next to it in another text box. You can just encapsulate all of this in an html form, allowing the user to assign an order to each of the items, or change the existing order, and then let the user press 'save'. Take the order assigned to each of the modules, and write it back to the database. When you read it out for display, you can now order it by the order_id associated with each item. To store each user's preference, just make a simple table that has the userid in it, and then either a field with comma delimited ids (in the order to be displayed) for the modules so that you can link back to the module list table, or some other format of storing the order of the modules in a fieldset.

Obvisouly, there are any number of possibilities to do this, even just by changing one or two of the items within this suggestion, you can get several solutions, but this should work decently. Just make sure to define all possible uses of this 'listing' before you implement it, as you may see other uses or possibilities as you scope it out.

eoghain

Yes that is a better exampel. What you will need to do is have a field in your table that stored position id's (I'll assume that your display_order field is this field). Now you just need to let your users adjust this field either manually (not a good idea) or through an interface.

A basic way of doing this is to display all data in a table in it's current display order, and give the user Up and Down buttons to move any row a single position. Then have the code in the background swap the display_order number of that field and the one either above or below it.