Looping SQL rows and sorting them

Question

As it was pointed out in the answers, I was not looking to organize results, but to filter them. I'm sorry for the confusion! :D

I've tried my best to google my way out of this problem, but I'm having a very hard time finding a solution..

I have a SQL database with this structure, as I'm trying to make a basic CMS:

pageid | title | pagetext | menu_par

What I want to do is make a navigation on the page, that loops all the rows and makes them look like links, which my teacher helped me with a few months back:

$query_MenuItems = "SELECT pageid,title,menu_par FROM v2 ORDER BY menu_par ASC";
$MenuItems = $mysqli->query($query_MenuItems);
$row_MenuItem = $MenuItems->fetch_assoc();
$totalRows_MenuItems = $MenuItems->num_rows;    

do { echo 
"<a href=\"?page={$row_MenuItem['pageid']}\">{$row_MenuItem['title']}</a><br/>";
} 
while ($row_MenuItem = $MenuItems->fetch_assoc());
}

This works fine, however my issue is that I have no idea how to sort the different links, based on what their menu_par value is.

I feel like I have tried everything in my power to fix this, and it is stressing me out

Is there any way I can make a similiar loop as the one above, but sorting it by using more than one?:

while ($row_MenuItem = $MenuItems->fetch_assoc())
{
if ("{$row_MenuItem['menu_par']}" == '1') echo
"<a href=\"?page={$row_MenuItem['id']}\">{$row_MenuItem['title']}</a><br/>";
}

I hope you guys can help me :)

Answer 1

First of all, i didn't read the whole question but load all data and, then, sorting it into PHP doesn't seems a good idea. DBMS are designed for that, and due to your query for retrive data, you should order them directly by doing something like that

SELECT pageid,title,menu_par FROM v2 order by menu_par

Answer 2

Why not using ORDER BY in Your SQL query?

SELECT pageid,title,menu_par FROM v2 ORDER BY menu_par ASC

By this query (and the ORDER BY x ASC clause) the records are ordered by menu_par value in ascending order...

You can read more about this here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/order-by-optimization.html

If You want to filter the results instead depending on the menu_par value (eg You want to select just those links that has menu_par == 1 ) You would use a WHERE clause:

SELECT pageid,title,menu_par FROM v2 WHERE menu_par = 1

Answer 3

You should do it in the database, using a WHERE clause.

SELECT pageid,title,menu_par FROM v2
WHERE menu_par = 1