http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=438562


in reply to reordering a stack with little effort

How about adding another column, called ordering or something?

QUESTIONS ----------------- QUESTION_ID (pk) QUESTION_NUM (int) QUESTION (varchar) SHOW_THE_QUESTION (bit) QUESTION_ORDER (int)

Getting the questions in the correct order then simply means using ORDER BY QUESTION_ORDER.

If you initially increment QUESTION_ORDER by ten or fifty or whatever, you can insert other questions in between the existing ones. This allows you to keep the integrity of "if you answered $something on $question_id .." references, while giving you (a bit) more flexibility in the ordering.

This is of course not a complete solution to the problem, since some devil's advocate will surely reply to this node saying "What if you want to insert $inc + 1 questions between question 1 and 2?" (Where $inc is the difference between the two question's QUESTION_ORDER). In this case you will be forced to reorder your QUESTION_ORDER columns, but you will still have the integrity between questions.

A little bit of decoupling goes a long way, though.

pernod
--
Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.