Monday, September 13, 2004 - Mon, 13 Sep 2004

Now there is the matter of sort order. I’ve never known what was best for me. Do you want your mail sorted oldest to newest (oldest at the top and newest at the end) or the other way around? I presume people might like it either way. The Outlook Express way is to click on the “Sent” column header and the sort order changes. I can do that as well. First I capture those little arrows up and down as graphics so that I can add the appropriate one next to the “Sent” to be indicative of the current order. To implement the order, I don’t want to add another field to the database, nor do I want this to be a cookie or another parameter to the webpage. So I figured out a little trick that works. The last message viewed that is kept in the database for each user can be positive if they used an increasing order, and negative if they use a decreasing order. With not too much coding and some testing, that seems to work fine. Onto the message preview I go.