Question

Platform: SQLite on Android.

Problem: table has three columns – id, title and order. Data in table has some “duplicate” order records, for example, there are 2 records with order “3” (example bellow). Order value also have “holes” in them – for example, there is no order value “2”.

Example table and select to pull it: *select _id,title,order from table order by order;*

_id         TITLE      ORDER    
----------  ----------  ----------
5           First        0         
19          Second       1         
1           Third        3         
4           Fourth       3         
3           Fifth        5         
16          Sixt         7        

What is needed? Is there a way to update current records in table to “reset” values in ORDER column, while preserving as much as possible. Possible result after update that would be optimal is:

_id         TITLE      ORDER    
----------  ----------  ----------
5           First        0         
19          Second       1         
1           Third        2         
4           Fourth       3         
3           Fifth        4         
16          Sixt         5        

Anyone has idea how to do this on SQLite running on Android? If this was Oracle and SQLServer I could be using #temp tables or cursors, but here…?

Answer 1

There may be a better solution, but I would simply select and save them into an array in the order that you want. Then you can loop through with a for loop and update the ORDER field for each record using the for loops iterator value.