Question

I have a table which has a column labeled ‘sortorder’ which is used to allow customer to manually change the order of each item. The table also has a column labeled ‘CategoryId’.

I was curious, if I was bulk importing a set of data in which I knew all data, including CategoryId, how I could specify the incrimenting value for ‘SortOrder’ inside the query, so that it went from 1 to X within each unique CategoryId.

Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

I’m not sure I understand your question but I think what you’re asking is how to synthesize an appropriate SortOrder during an insert into the table. You should use ROW_NUMBER() with partitioning by CategoryId. Of course you will need to define a sorting criteria that gives the propert order of ‘1 to X’:

INSERT INTO myTable (SortOrder, CategoryId, <other columns> ...)
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY CategoryId ORDER BY mySortCriteria)
  , CategoryId
  , <other columns> ...
  FROM SourceTable;