Hello everyone,

i accidently found a neat feature of MYSQL on the web, which isn't even documented in the official MySQL 5.x manual (original blog entry to be found at http://www.cfdan.com/posts/Handy_MySQL_-_ORDER_BY_FIELD.cfm">original Blog Posting)

Basicly i needed a way to create some custom order for my records, so i started to build a raw SQL query. Then i ran into troubles when i tried to get this working with a pager.. all in all, i tried it to solve it with Criteria.

I created a new class, myCriteria which inherits from the original Criteria class.

/**
 * Add order by column name with a custom Order for a given Field
 *
 * @param unknown_type $propertyBracket
 * @return unknown
 */
public function addCustomOrderByColum($propertyField, $propertyList) {
    $this->orderByColumns[] = 'FIELD('.$propertyField.', ' . $propertyList .' )';
    return $this;
}
 

An example could look like:

$c->addCustomOrderByColum(CustomPeer::TYPE, " 'Sold', 'Pending', 'Announced' ");
 

This way you can create ORDER BY Statements which are not bound to common ASC/DESC rules.