Oracle table sorting question

Hello Group:

I'm building an application which uses an Oracle database to store meeting agendas. There is a JSP front end where users will enter the topic and duration of their presentations, then the actual time within the meeting constraints is assigned. If someone wishes to talk to a subject that is typically covered at the beginning of the meeting, their agenda entry gets inserted at the beginning topic, all others index by that same duration...

Checks need to be made to prevent the meeting going overtime, and an administrator function of locking a timeslot must be accomodated. (For instance, someone has conflicting meetings and can only present at 8:00).

My question has to do with what is the best place to handle this sorting and assigning of times.

I was thinking about creating a bean (Java bean, that is) to hold an "agenda item object" with characteristics equivalent to all of the items in the line of the datatable, then when you attempt to enter a new item, Java reads in all of the items for that agenda and assigns them into an array... then we simply programmatically shuffle or bubble sort or whatever, finally writing (updating) the array back into Oracle.

While that would work, I'm hoping that there may be a more elegant way to handle this, perhaps through SQL or some Oracle function unknown to me (see, I'm kinda new to SQL and all things Oracle).

So --- if any of y'all have ideas, I'd love to hear them!

Please e-mail your comments (but not SPAM) to wolfgang<at>deathsdoor<dot>com, as I cannot access newsgroups from the office.

Best regards,

Ron Received on Thu Jan 04 2001 - 15:10:18 CET