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There is a field 'noticeBy' enum('email','mobile','all','auto','nothing') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'auto'. As it known ordering by ENUM field performs relative to its index. However, how it possible make order by its values?

Andy G
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abdulmanov.ilmir
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5 Answers5

85

As documented under Sorting:

ENUM values are sorted based on their index numbers, which depend on the order in which the enumeration members were listed in the column specification. For example, 'b' sorts before 'a' for ENUM('b', 'a'). The empty string sorts before nonempty strings, and NULL values sort before all other enumeration values.

To prevent unexpected results when using the ORDER BY clause on an ENUM column, use one of these techniques:

  • Specify the ENUM list in alphabetic order.

  • Make sure that the column is sorted lexically rather than by index number by coding ORDER BY CAST(col AS CHAR) or ORDER BY CONCAT(col).

Per the second bullet, you can therefore sort on the column after it has been cast to a string:

ORDER BY CAST(noticeBy AS CHAR)
eggyal
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  • Very nice, thank you! Odd that this best (highest voted) and accepted answer is not at the top? If it's for lack of comments, hoping this one will help. – jtubre Dec 11 '21 at 22:50
  • @jtubre: There are three sort buttons between the question and answers: "Active", "Oldest" and "Votes". If you sort by votes, this answer should be top? But it won't be top under the other sort orders (it used to be that accepted answers were pinned to the top regardless, but [StackOverflow changed that a few months ago](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-answers-accepted-answer-is-now-unpinned-on-stack-overflow)). – eggyal Dec 12 '21 at 00:22
78

This also works:

ORDER BY FIELD(noticeBy, 'all','auto','email','mobile','nothing')

(I don't believe that there is a setting to achieve this, you have to provide the sort-values.)

Andy G
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33

You can define your order however you wish:

ORDER BY CASE noticeBy
           WHEN 'email' THEN 1
           WHEN 'mobile' THEN 2
           WHEN 'all' THEN 3
           WHEN 'auto' THEN 4
           ELSE 5
         END

This will return the rows in the following order: email, mobile, all, auto, nothing.

Fabian Bigler
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0

In my case, I had to sort enum results by the "ENUM" field and also make sure the values are in DESCENDING order. My enum had the following values: 'Open','Closed'

So when I used ORDER BY CAST(status AS CHAR), the results were in this order:

Closed
Open
Open

But I wanted the Open status tickets to be shown first and then the Closed tickets. So I used the following:

ORDER BY CAST(status AS CHAR) DESC

This gave me the order that I was looking for i.e.

Open
Open
Closed

Summary:

Just using ORDER BY CAST on an enum did not seem to help. To sort the results in a specific order, mentioning ASC or DESC as well, did the trick.

Devner
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0

The best option to me:

ORDER BY FIELD(status, 'publish','not-publish','expirated','deleted'), creation DESC

Status is the field in my BBDD, and values in '' are the values that has in enum options.

I hope that help u too! :)

Fllopis
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