Sort multiple records with textfield

Question

Hi everyone!
I want to sort from the backend all the products in a site.
First, i use the repeat region server behavior, to list all the products. Added a textfield in each record, with the value of it's position (1, 2, 3, 4, etc).
How can i update that?
Just like Joomla! has in it's backend. A list with all the articles created, and the ability to change the order of the articles, changing it's number and pressing "save".
Hope you guys understand me, my english is very very poor...
Thanks in advance
Cheers!
A pic to better understanding:

Answer 1

Since you refer to Joomla, I presume you want to do this with PHP/MySQL.
Basically, you need to put your repeat region in a form, and submit the values of the product IDs and the new order numbers as arrays. To do this with PHP, you add a pair of square brackets after the form elements' names like this:
<input type="text" name="product_id[]" value="....
<input type="text" name="order[]" ...
When the form is submitted, $_POST['product_id'] will contain an array of the primary keys, and $_POST['order'] will contain an array of the values inserted in the order text boxes.
You then need to create a loop to update the existing records in the database. The following is not the full code, but should show you the basic principle:
// connect to database
for ($i = 0, $len = count($_POST['product_id']); $i < $len; $i++) {
    $sql = 'UPDATE products SET order = ' . mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['order'][$i]
           . ' WHERE product_id = ' . mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['product_id'][$i];
    mysql_query($sql);
This loops through the $_POST['product_id'] array and updates each record with the appropriate value for order. The SQL query assumes that both product_id and order are numeric data types.