Re: [SQLObject] Best way to order columns

[Mark M. <ma...@di...>]

On 10 Jul 2003 14:18:07 -0500, Ian Bicking <ia...@co...> wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 13:01, Mark Melvin wrote:
>> I have two questions:
>>
>> 1) What is the best way force a particular order to the columns returned 
>> by a select()?
>>
>> By this I do not mean sorting records - I mean the order of the columns.
>>
>> So for a given select(), SQLObject returns the columns in the order they 
>> appear in the database.  Is there a way to specify a new default in 
>> which they are returned, or do I have to reorder them myself after I do 
>> a select()?
>
> Columns aren't ordered as they are returned -- full objects with
> attributes for the columns are returned.
>

Yes, of course.  Perhaps I am using things in a bad way.  In order to 
generate column labels for a list control I am iterating through the 
SQLObject._columns attribute, pulling out .kw['name'] for each one.  It is 
a list in a particular order, which I assume is used to generate the 
select() statement because the order appears to match.  It does not appear 
to match the order in which the columns are created in my particular class. 
 I guess I should look at the source to see how this _columns list is 
created and go from there.


>> 2) In terms of sorting records, it appears that when I specify a join, I 
>> can use the orderBy keyword and pass it a list and it will happily sort 
>> the items based on the order of the items in the list (at least it 
>> appears to work that way).  However the _defaultOrder class variable 
>> will not take a list.  Is there any way to specify more than one 
>> parameter to the SQL that is generated for the "ORDER BY" clause as the 
>> default for select()?
>
> There was supposed to be :(  I guess I forgot the last part of
> implementing it.  Bad me for not making the right test.  CVS has this
> fix.  I think I'll put out a 0.4.1 before too long as well.
>

Cool.  I have re-architected my LEFT JOINed approach to be a single table 
and I am finding SQLObject pretty sweet.  Simplifying my first case helped 
me a lot to get started, and it should be easier to extend to more 
complicated cases.  I found the documentation - while good, is missing a 
lot of the little things.  I found myself doing a dir() on object a lot to 
figure out what was in there.

At any rate - thanks for a great tool.  It is making this project a lot 
easier.

-- 
Thanks,
Mark.