is there any way I can force result rows into a specific order?

Kinsbane

Okay so I have a table of rows.

let's call them A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J

Here's the order I need them in:

C, D, A, B, G, H, E, F, I, J

Is there any possible way to do this without adding in a "order" field into the table?

Sayian

Theirs only 2 ways off the top of my head i can think of sorting these.

Is to be smart, and use MYSQL's built in ORDER BY function
Is to have php order the data, which will be much slower.

Kinsbane

bah. i just got word from my boss that he said to go ahead and do an "order" field in the table of the DB.. sorry for posting this.. :/

Sayian

Just remember ... anytime you can have MySQL do something that php doesnt have to do, its going to be much faster.

niroshan

well this is just an idea and i dont no how much this will help you. Like 'Sayian' says if you try to sort it using PHP it will be slow compairing to order it using a 'order by' function.

so i would suguest, keep an extra field in the table so that will define the order of the data. EX:

alphabet dataOrder

A 3
B 4
C 1
D 2
E 7
F 8
G 5
H 6
I 9
J 10

So now when you fetching the data you can use the 'dataOrder' field with 'order by' function.

TIP: To do so you need to know the order when you insert the data into the table.

As i said this is just an idea. Hope this would help your problem.

Good luck

Regards,
Niroshan