We track project progression in a single database. Over the last two years, the requirements of management have changed the format of which we store dates (originally, just the year, then year month, now full dates). To ensure there were no complaints from the database, the previous administrator set-up the table to store the dates in varchar
instead of date
. I've created a web-interface for users to access and generate reports, but the webpage is static (user-side). Management wants to be able to sort by click on the table headers. That's easy. My problem is those dates! Because of the formats, they don't sort correctly.
Here's the three forms the dates can appear in from the PHP: %Y
, %Y%m
, and %c/%e/%Y
.
I'm using tablesorter to sort the table, but I can't figure out how to sort the dates via the jQuery. The inital sorting is done entirely in the MySQL query:
ORDER BY
CASE WHEN cstatus = 'Complete' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END DESC,
CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cdevelopmentStart) > 6 THEN
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%m/%d/%Y'), '%c/%e/%2014')
ELSE
CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cdevelopmentStart) > 4 THEN
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%Y%m'), '%c/%e/%Y')
ELSE
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%Y'), '%c/%e/%Y')
END
END DESC,
id DESC
I need to replicate the sorting for the date columns in the jQuery sorting.
Hopefully, I'll have more luck after a nights rest, but I wanted to post this up in case anyone can give me a headstart. ^^
Solution:
I modified the query to, instead of sorting by the conditions initially, leave it to default sorting and creating additional columns to populate the data-text
attribute, as suggested by Mottie.
SELECT
CASE WHEN cdevelopmentStart IS NULL THEN
'01/01/2012'
ELSE
CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cdevelopmentStart) > 6 THEN
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%m/%d/%Y'), '%m/%d/%Y')
ELSE
CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cdevelopmentStart) > 4 THEN
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%Y%m'), '%m/01/%Y')
ELSE
DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(cdevelopmentStart, '%Y'), '01/01/%Y')
END
END
END AS developmentSort,
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Complete' THEN
0
ELSE
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Cancelled' THEN
1
ELSE
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Hold' THEN
2
ELSE
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Review' THEN
3
ELSE
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Rework' THEN
4
ELSE
CASE WHEN courses.cstatus = 'Open' THEN
5
ELSE
6
END
END
END
END
END
END AS statusSort
Then, I added data-text="' . $result['developmentSort'] . '"
and data-text="' . $result['statusSort'] . '"
to the corresponding columns of the PHP-generated table. Lastly, I set-up the default sorting and instructed it to pull from the data-text
attribute, if set, by adding the following to the <HEAD>
:
$("#mainlist").tablesorter({
textAttribute: 'data-text',
usNumberFormat: true,
sortList: [[19, 0], [6, 1], [0, 1]]
});
Thank you, Mottie, for the quick reply and solution. :)
Once you pull the dates in, I would make them all the same format. So for a date of "2014", make it "1/1/2014". For a date of "2014/6", make it "6/1/2014". They you should be able to sort them all because they will all be dates in the same format.
Maybe the easiest solution would be to add a data-attribute to each table cell which contains a "properly" formatted date string
then, if you use my fork of tablesorter, you can use the following code (demo):
If you must use the original tablesorter, then you can use this code with the same HTML (demo):