There are two parts to the problem - persisting the sort order and setting the sort order. Persisting the sort order is server side and easily handled as suggested. Setting the sort order requires client side scripting support and is the harder problem to solve, and also somewhat off topic for this site (although I don't see that as an impediment to someone here providing a solution).

True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re^5: How to let a user sort a list on a web page by GrandFather
in thread How to allow a user to reorder rows from a database using a web form? by yaconsult

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