Perl and CGI should be your backend process for this. For the frontend, if you mean dynamic sorting and table sorting you could use the jQuery datatables plugin.

Thank you for the pointers.

There is an excellent add-on to jQuery called jQuery UI. It has an example page that does exactly what I want. It's called Sortable and you can play with a demo here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/ Drag and drop the items to change their order.

The small amount of javascript code to do all this with the jquery ui library is listed below. The question now is, how can I do this from my perl script? There doesn't seem to yet be a jQuery-UI module in cpan. Can anyone demonstrate a way to get the demo below running from a perl script?

Examples, links, pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks!

<style>
    #sortable { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 6
+0%; }
    #sortable li { margin: 0 3px 3px 3px; padding: 0.4em; padding-left
+: 1.5em; font-size: 1.4em; height: 18px; }
    #sortable li span { position: absolute; margin-left: -1.3em; }
    </style>
    <script>
    $(function() {
        $( "#sortable" ).sortable();
        $( "#sortable" ).disableSelection();
    });
    </script>

<div class="demo">

<ul id="sortable">
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 1</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 2</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 3</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 4</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 5</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 6</li>
    <li class="ui-state-default"><span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrowthi
+ck-2-n-s"></span>Item 7</li>
</ul>

</div><!-- End demo -->

<div style="display: none;" class="demo-description">
<p>
    Enable a group of DOM elements to be sortable. Click on and drag a
+n
    element to a new spot within the list, and the other items will ad
+just to
    fit. By default, sortable items share <code>draggable</code> prope
+rties.
</p>
</div><!-- End demo-description -->
[download]

I didn't appreciate that this was the kind of sorting you were looking for, however I'm glad you've found this useful. You'll notice this example code from the jQuery page works as is, you don't need any Perl module to make it work. Using CGI (or CGI::Application or your framework of choice) you can output dynamic content. You simply include this example jQuery code in the output you send to the browser.

I'd suggest using a templating system such as HTML::Template or Template::Toolkit to separate your Perl code from the HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. If you look at the HTML::Template documentation you'll notice the <TMPL_LOOP> tag which you could use to populate your sortable data (in the example above each row is a HTML <li>, list item).

I'd also suggest that you benchmark performance of this method with your dataset and compare it to the performance of the datatable plugins I mentioned previously.

The question is not clear. If it is about UI, then it is best to ask future users. I don't know what are those priorities you are talking about, so how should I know which input method should be used? Take into account available to you methods for displaying UI and discuss things with the users. If you don't know who is going to use it, then choose the one you yourself like the best :)

Once you have extracted the data and constructed the table with Perl (backend), perhaps Javascript to give the user experience of prioritizing. I did something similar recently using http://www.frequency-decoder.com/2006/09/16/unobtrusive-table-sort-script-revisited.

Simply provide a combo-box with sort-choices as part of the form.

Within your code, define a hashref that contains, for each possible valid value within the combo, the known-good SQL for an ORDER BY clause.   When you see that the POSTed data contains the sort-choice combo, try to look up that value within the hash.   If you find it, use the corresponding known-good SQL text in your next query.   (Otherwise, use some default, or generate a “Bug” error-message.)

Of course, it should go without saying that you must not use any user-provided text directly within your SQL string.   This is why the hashref, which is defined in your Perl code, contains all of the legitimate possibilities for the sort-field, and the corresponding SQL text.   (You can handle both “ascending” and “descending” sorts with an obvious variation of this technique.   Also notice that you can easily “do what I mean,” even if the actual SORT BY clause includes multiple database-columns, a mixture of ASC and DESC, and so on.)

I guess I haven't been clear enough about the sorting requirements. Perhaps an example would help...

Let's say each row in the table represents something like a task or project.

One person, like a manager or something, would have the ability to bring up a form in which each row represents a task/project.

His responsibility is to decide the order in which these tasks/projects should be completed. So he's dealing with entire rows, not the individual cells or columns.

What can I build that make it easy for him to log in, get his set of rows, easily rearrange them to the order he wants, and then capture the ordering he has specified?

Thanks!

Add a SortOrder column to your database and let the manager edit the values in that column for each row. Each time you fetch the data for display append "Order By SortOrder" to the SQL.

True laziness is hard work