Question

I have many rows in a mysql table. There is an order_id column. I want to order by two columns, first by order_id and next by id(auto increment).
The problem is that i entered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… for order_id and leave blank for the others. In my example i want to display first the rows that has the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 but instead it shows the rows with blank order_id since that is less than 1.
Is there a way to start the order at 1?

Example:

id | order_id | name
1  | NULL     | test name 1
2  | 1        | test name 2
3  | NULL     | test name 3
4  | 2        | test name 4
5  | 3        | test name 5

I would like my order statement to give the following result

test name 2
test name 4
test name 5
test name 1
test name 3

As you can see from the example i first order by the “order_id” column starting at 1

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Are the missing values represented with NULL? If so then something like this should do the trick:

SELECT *
FROM your_table
ORDER BY IF(order_id IS NULL, 1, 0), order_id, id

If the missing values aren’t NULL then you’ll need to alter your IF clause accordingly. For example, if the missing fields are actually empty strings then you would probably use something like this instead:

SELECT *
FROM your_table
ORDER BY IF(order_id = '', 1, 0), order_id, id