Question

I’m dynamically generating a table, as well as the column headers.

How do I make the columns clickable (NO JavaScript!), so that when they’re clicked, they add a sort=columnNameHere entry to the query, and reload the current page with that query?

Answer 1

It would be helpful to know your server-side language, but since you didn’t include that, you’ll want the code to output html as follows…

<table>
   <thead>
      <th><a href="test.html?sort=Name">Name</a></th>
      <th><a href="test.html?sort=Location">Location</a></th>
   </thead>
   <tr>
      <td>Bob</td>
      <td>Canada</td>
   </tr>
</table>

on the server you need to make sure you get the sort variable from the collection of get variables and apply it to the source query. In pseudocode, this would be something like:

   currentSort = Request["sort"] 
   data = db.Execute("select * from customersorder by " + sqlescape(currentSort))

  //write table header 
  foreach col in columns
    write("<th><a href='test.html?sort=" + col + "'>" + col + "</a>")

  //close header, start data 
  for each row in data    
    write...