The ORDER BY Clause
In this lesson we are going to write PHP scripts that select a records in MySQL and sort it using the ORDER BY clause.
Using ORDER BY clause we can sort the data in a recordset in a ascending or descending order.
ASC – ascending order (default)
DESC – descending order
We can execute any sql query like insert, update, delete, select etc. using the mysql_query() function.Here is the code:
<?php //including the database connection fileinclude("mysql_connect.php"); mysql_select_db("employee");$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM employee_record ORDER BY f_name");echo "<table border='1'> <tr> <th>ID</th> <th>Firstname</th> <th>Lastname</th> <th>Position</th> <th>Age</th> <th>Salary</th> <th>Email</th> </tr>";while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { echo "<tr>"; echo "<td>".$row['id']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['f_name']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['l_name']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['position']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['age']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['salary']."</td>"; echo "<td>".$row['email']."</td>"; echo "</tr>"; } echo "</table>"; ?>
In the above example it will select all the data stored in our table and then sort it by f_name in an ascending order.
In our example we have used include() function, this function takes all the content in a specified file and includes it in the current file.
Then, we have selected the employee database using the mysql_select_db() function.
Next, we have declared a variable $result that will store the value returned by mysql_query() function.
Next, we use the mysql_fetch_array() function to fetch a row from a recordset as an array.
Then, we place the mysql_fetch_array() function within the conditional statement of the while loop. It means that the while loop will continue to execute as long as there a row to fetch.