Order by values inside a field???

lucibalaj

Hello, does anybody know how I can order based in values inside a field? I have a field called departments and I have the values inside it: secretary, vicepresident, president etc. I want to sort this in order to have as output president, vice-president, secretary etc. Thank you! Lucian.

Jasp182

lucibalaj wrote:
Hello, does anybody know how I can order based in values inside a field? I have a field called departments and I have the values inside it: secretary, vicepresident, president etc. I want to sort this in order to have as output president, vice-president, secretary etc. Thank you! Lucian.

I would create an enumeration so that you could rank them.

$department_names=array(1=>"President",2=>"Vice-President",3=>"Secretary);

so, in the db, the field would have a numeric value and your query could be ordered correctly (ORDER BY departments ASC), and in your html you can display the text version

echo $department_names[$row['departments']];

Weedpacket

You could also have the enumeration in the database, depending on whether or not the DBMS you're using has an enumeration datatype.

lucibalaj

You could also have the enumeration in the database, depending on whether or not the DBMS you're using has an enumeration datatype.

Hello, I think that this will be more suitable, but how can I do this? Thanks! Lucian.

Weedpacket

Depends on your DBMS (MySQL or whatever); consult its documentation.