Sorting Attributes

I’ve not found a built in way to control sorting the product attributes yet. There’s probably a contribution to do this however considering it’s only a single line change which took me about 5 minutes to find I figured it wasn’t a concern to find a contribution for it. At present there is no ordering of the attributes when they’re pulled from the database. Regardless of how you enter them in the retrieval seems to just randomly make its own mind up about how they should be displayed! When a client first brought this to my attention and said they’d been inputting them in the correct order, and the order of the attributes where in the same order as the order id’s (ie. lowest id for the first item and highest id for the last item) it made me wonder just how it was coming out. Usually when you run a SELECT statement in MySQL if you don’t give it an order it comes out in the row order. But at the same time this often isn’t the same order as the items were added.

Anyhow, so which line do you change? Under the products_info.php file find the line:
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "'");

and at the end of the SQL statement add (for ordering by id)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC

giving you
$products_options_query = tep_db_query("select pov.products_options_values_id, pov.products_options_values_name, pa.options_values_price, pa.price_prefix from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_ATTRIBUTES . " pa, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_OPTIONS_VALUES . " pov where pa.products_id = '" . (int)$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id'] . "' and pa.options_id = '" . (int)$products_options_name['products_options_id'] . "' and pa.options_values_id = pov.products_options_values_id and pov.language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "' ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_id ASC");

This method orders the attributes by id number, the number you see at the start of the attribute line in the admin section. If you wanted it ordered alphabetically you could use (untested!)
ORDER BY pov.products_options_values_name ASC

or by price
ORDER BY pa.options_values_price ASC