>>I read a tip in July's Foxpro Advisor that you can use paramters for other than the where clause in an SQL view, fox example the Order by (provided you use the numeric construct, e.g. ORDER BY 2, instead of the field name). I couldn't get it to work however (got an error when I included ORDER BY ?testorde after setting testorde to 2 in the command window). Has anyone had any success or attempted this?
>>
>>I was intrigued by the idea as I'm trying to create an SQL for a report, but my users want to have flexibility in how it is ordered: Alphabetically, by District, or by Category. I don't want to create many different instances of the same SQL for this purpose. Perhaps I'm overlooking something obvious or another way to allow for this flexibility.
>>
>>I'd appreciate any ideas.
>>
>>TIA
>>
>>Sylvia
>
>n="1"
>select * from table1 order by &n.
>n="2"
>select * from table1 order by &n.

Ed -

Thanks a lot - this worked (I also found I can use something like "6,5" in N to order by two or more fields). I see you used macro substitution as opposed to the parameterized notation (?somefield) the article indicated could be used. Given that, is there any advantage to using the field number in this kind of situation instead of the field name (or doesn't it make a difference)?

Sylvia