Question

Ok i saw many post’s on how to serialize the value of dragged items to get hash and they tell how to save them. Now the question is how do i persist the dragged items the next time when user log’s in using the has value that i got
eg:

  <ul class="list">
        <li id="id_1">
            <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content">
            </div>
        </li>
        <li id="id_2">
            <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content">
            </div>
        </li>
        <li id="id_3">
            <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content">
            </div>
        </li>
        <li id="id_4">
            <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget">
            </div>
        </li>
    </ul>

which on serialize will give

"id[]=1&id[]=2&id[]=3&id[]=4"

Now think that i saved it to Sql server database in a single field called SortOrder.
Now how do i get the items to these order again ?
the code to make these sort is below,without which people didn’t know which library i had used to sort and serialize

 <script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $(".list li").css("cursor", "move");
        $(".list").sortable();
    });
</script>

Answer 1

I believe what Brian is saying is that your table should look like this, if they were sorted in ascending order by the user:

ID Sort Order

1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4

If they were sorted in descending order by the user, the table would look like this:

ID Sort Order

1 4
2 3
3 2
4 1

Then, when you query the database, you would do

SELECT [ID], [Sort Order]
FROM [thetable]
ORDER BY [Sort Order]

and the list would be sorted by the server.

You can then just output the data in the order the server code provides it in.