SQL order by two columns & loop

[Izzyg33]

+----------+---------+

| Category | id      |

+----------+---------+
| 1        | 70      |

| 1        | 71      |

| 3        | 80      |

| 4        | 73      |

| 5        | 83      |

| 5        | 81      |

| 5        | 69      |

| 4        | 72      |

| 1        | 74      |

| 4        | 82      |

| 3        | 85      |

| 3        | 68      |

| 4        | 88      |

| 6        | 66      |

+----------+---------+

I have the following table, and need a way of producing results which will involve an SQL statement with a loop, but i'm not sure how.

First I want to take out the results in order of category, so 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and for each of those categories, order the records by id, (category/id  1/70, 1/71, 1/74, 3/68, 3/80, 3/85, 4/72, 4/73, 4/88 etc...).

When there are no more records to show, I want to loop back to the first smallest category and ID number.

How is this possible? Note that the categories do not ascend by +1 every time, so it is not possible to take the previous category number and +1.

Thanks in advance.

Izzy

[David_Powers]

Not sure what you mean by needing a loop, but you can order the results the way you want very simply:

SELECT Category, id
FROM this_table
ORDER BY Category, id

[Izzyg33]

Hi David

Thanks for this. I realise that I didn't explain the problem properly at all!

I need just one record from the table so show at a time (its a photo gallery), and the category number has to be the same or higher than the previous (if there is not a higher category number, then start again from the beginning), and the id has to be higher than the previous for that category. Thats where it gets complicated!

I'm passing the previous record's category and id to the next page via appending them to a 'next' button.

Thanks for your help.

Izzy

[bregent]

Sorry, based on your description, all you need is the order by that David provided. If this is still wrong, please post example data that shows how you would like the data ordered.