ORDER BY issue

[vinny199]

Hi,

I would like to display items on a page ranked by Catalogue number, which is not my primary key, but just imputed into a table field called CAT

My catalogue numbers are alphanumerical (AAA000)

Is it possible at all to display fields by catalogue number first ranking the letters by alphabetical order and then the numbers

E.G:
ABC001
ABC002
ABC003
AMM001
AMM002
AMM003
ZZZ001

do you know what I mean?
Should I use a specific type of field in MySql table?

Alternativaely can it at least rank by letters only?

Thanks,

vinny

[jnuneznyc]

I am a bit confused by your post. Cause a normal AlphaNumeric sort would sort in the order that you specified. Just add ORDER BY CAT to the end of your SELECT statement. The field to use is VARCHAR if the field will grow past the 6 chars but if every record must have 6 characters and will never grow then the faster datatype would be CHAR.