Question

I have a simple task list which contains amongst others a title field and a deadline field. Some tasks got deadlines, other don’t. Deadlines are simply stored with a MySQL date type.

But the tough part (for me anyway) is to sort the tasks in the correct order:

1. Ascending deadlines
2. The rest (maybe by ID, but not important)

Current query:

SELECT * FROM tasks ORDER BY deadline ASC

The deadline field is ‘0000-00-00’ by default, so this query will show the tasks in the following order:

1. Tasks with no deadlines
2. Ascending deadlines

Can anybody point me in the right direction, or do I need to do multiple queries?

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM tasks
ORDER BY CASE WHEN deadline = '0000-00-00'
              THEN '9999/09/09' 
              ELSE deadline 
         END ASC

When sorting, replace ‘0000-00-00’ by a ‘big’ datetime value: ‘9999/09/09’.