Reordering items in Contacts

Question

Hi, I have a slightly defeatist feeling that although what I am asking seems pretty basic, it's not possible.  But I'm hoping I'm the one on the idiot side of this question and that Apple has a magically hidden way to do this that I am missing.
Within a given contact card, I need to reorder an individual's email addresses, and phone numbers (and even mailing addresses) within those respective lists.
All my contacts have numerous email addresses and phone numbers.  Some even have many addresses.  And I can't be reading through random lists of numbers in search of the current most important; I want the contextually most important items at the top. But Apple appears to lock all these items in the order of entry.
Obviously, the order one enters contact information of individuals over the years in no way correlates to how important or relevant the data is for that person. So locking the items in that order is illogical.
Did I just miss the method?
I already tried setting a template in preferences but that doesn't affect the hundreds of contacts I have already collected until now.
The only way I have found so far is the "are-you-kidding-there-is-no-way-a-sane-person-would-do-this" method of deleting all the data and re-entering it all by hand in the order you want it.  And then subsequently doing that every time a contact sends you a new bit of data, ad infinitum.

Answer 1

How do I process these changes so that the changes
are saved?Hm? The page we are talking about is a wizard-generated tabular form on a table. The wizard already creates MRU (multi-row update/delete) processes and Save/Delete buttons. Don't you already have all this setup?
I have a column in my table called POSITION that is
supposed to store the ordering.Right, that corresponds to the SEQ column in my example.
Where does it go?:
create table emp_up_down as select * from emp;
alter table emp_up_down add (seq integer unique
deferrable initially deferred);
update emp_up_down set seq=rownum;I showed a self-contained fully-working example on that other thread. Something anyone could take, understand and modify according to their specific requirements. So, no, I doubt you would need the exact same code I posted!
Those 3 SQL statements just create a table, add a SEQ column to it and populate it. You probably already have all this.
The important thing I wanted to point out was that the unique constraint on the SEQ (POSITION or whatever) column needs to be "deferrable initially deferred". Why? Because to swap the value of that column in 2 rows, the MRU process would do this in 2 UPDATE statements and after the first UPDATE statement, the unique constraint would be violated. By making it deferrable, we are asking Oracle to ignore the violation until a COMMIT is issued. A COMMIT would be done after all the updates are done and at that time, the SEQ column would be unique again.
Hope this helps.