Sortable table

[thorbergdt]

I have a client asking me for:

I have attached a spreadsheet that very likely will get updated every month or o; I’d like this to be sortable, ie, click on the category, and it sorts alphabetically for the user. And for every unique user, it would be reset to be alpha by name (the left hand column). The tricky part is that I would also like each ‘groups’ clinic name to be hyperlinked to their own websites (sites included on the word document)

so yeah.. pretty easy so it sounds he will send an updated excel file every few months, just wondering what might be the quickest easiest way of developing a page. Thanks,

[Raffles]

You will almost certainly have to use a server-side scripting language such as PHP. Ideally your script would take the excel spreadsheet and parse it, then put all the data into something usable, most likely a set of arrays. Then using those the HTML can be generated and by clicking on the category the arrays can be sorted accordingly. It would also be easy enough to attach a hyperlink to each item.

The most difficult thing I can foresee is the parsing of the spreadsheet. Since Excel will throw in a lot of junk along with the actual data, it might be worth asking the client to save it as a CSV or you can do this yourself. A CSV would be easier to parse.

[karinne]

I found this - http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/ - it used JS.

[Dr John]

Here's another one that uses javascript

http://mickweb.com/football/aleague/profiles.html

It uses a different function for each column

[thorbergdt]

Awesome thanks for the ideas, I didn't really want to get involved with a big database seeing how there are only 10 or so people on the list! I put one into use here http://www.orthopedicfitness.com/physician-finder.php