OK, bare with me here, my brain's a bit mushy at the moment!
Say, for example, I have a table (ONE) with 5 records in it, each with a unique ID. In another table (TWO) I have some records, each with 5 columns. Using those 5 columns in TWO, I want to select the information from ONE ordering it by the order of the columns in TWO.
So my tables would be:ONE
---
ID FIELD
1 abc
2 def
3 ghi
4 jkl
5 mno
TWO
---
ID COL1 COL2 COL3 COL4 COL5
1 3 1 2 5 4
And my query would be:SELECT O.FIELD FROM ONE O,TWO T WHERE O.ID IN (T.COL1,T.COL2,T.COL3,T.COL4,T.COL5) AND T.ID=1
And I want the returned recordset to be in the order:Any suggestions on how I'd achieve that without using any more tables or columns?
<edit>Figured it out - forgot I'd managed to achieve this before using MySQL's "FIELD" function. So now my query looks like this:SELECT O.FIELD FROM ONE O,TWO T WHERE O.ID IN (T.COL1,T.COL2,T.COL3,T.COL4,T.COL5) AND T.ID=1 ORDER BY FIELD(O.ID,T.COL1,T.COL2,T.COL3,T.COL4,T.COL5)
And returns the recordset in the desired order. Huzzah! </edit>