Cumulative Totals...

Question

I'm not quite the seasoned pro, but have been working with CF for about 5 years and usually can get it to do what I want.  I thought this would be relatively easy (and prob is to you) to add cumulative costs in the right column of a balance sheet type output, but it's kicked my butt long enough..lol
Just need it to sum cumulative costs of the items selected, in the order sorted. I've tried varying ways to get this to add and display like I need, dbqueries, loop indexes, using recordcount/currentrow calculations, etc, etc...no joy
Appreciate your time...really! 
<form...select...etc>
<cfquery name="getcosts" datasource="xxx">
SELECT *
FROM costs
ORDER by '#form.sortby#'
</cfquery>
<cfoutput query="getcosts">
*displays columns for #item_name#, #item_cost#, and cumulative cost* based on output sort order
</cfquery>

Answer 1

RLByrd78240 wrote:
<cfquery name="getcosts" datasource="xxx">
SELECT *
FROM costs
ORDER by '#form.sortby#'
</cfquery>
<cfoutput query="getcosts">
*displays columns for #item_name#, #item_cost#, and cumulative cost* based on output sort order
</cfquery>
I have some doubts about the clause ORDER by '#form.sortby#'. Does it actually work? should it at least be ORDER by #form.sortby# (without the quotes)? Test by dumping getcosts.
When grouping a set of records, you should use the order-by column of the query as the group attribute of the cfoutput tag. In other words, something like
<cfoutput query="getcosts" group="#form.sortby#">
To get cumulative costs, you could use a construction like
<cfset cumulative = 0>
<cfoutput>
blah blah blah
<cfset cumulative = cumulative + item_cost>
</cfoutput>