I have seen countless instances around the web where people are using the letters of the alphabet to sort a large recordset, in fact, I have even done it before but it has been ages since that project and I had forgotten exactly how I accomplished it.
Today I working on a project where I need to sort through a large number of manufactures for a particular customer. They wanted them sortable by clicking on a the first letter of the manufacturers name.
For the English alphabet, my solution was quite simple. By using the MySQL LIKE statement and filtering out everything after 1 letter I was able to quickly and efficiently find matches for a particular letter. The example below shows a sample query assuming we are sorting by the letter A.
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE column_name LIKE 'a%' |
I also found this solution works well for numbers and other symbols. Unfortunately, in my case the client wanted all items that start with any number grouped into a single result set because there was a small number of those items. Essentially, we I needed to do a MySQL select statement that captured all items that started with any number and return those manufacturers. After doing some noodling I came up with a solution that works quite well:
SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE column_name RLIKE '^[0-9]+' |
This regular expression will capture any number 0-9 and include it in the result set. This strategy could amended with different regular expression to fine tune the data selected.
At our office we love Google Drive. We use it to store just about everything. Since migrating to Google Drive we have been incredibly happy with the service. Our users can now access important information from any computer and they are not confined to our office location or VPN. That said, we have had one major problem we had a great deal of difficulty resolving. For some reason, several of our users have had problems with Google Drive silently crashing on a very regularly, almost hourly basis. Other users have had no problems at all. For many, this issue has been maddening, and after hours of research we were unable to find a solution online for our problem so we have been living with it for quite some time. We have even gone as far as considering moving to Dropbox or another solution to solve this problem. 
When presented with this problem, my first instinct was to look through the PhoneGap API documentation to see if I could find a way to interact with the internal phone system. After reviewing the documentation, I wasn’t able to find the desired solution, so, I started thinking of other ways to solve this problem. After some contemplation, I realized PhoneGap runs using the UIWebView browser, which, is more or less Safari without a back button. This led me to my solution, I realized I could use the same methodology I would use with a mobile website to create the click-to-call buttons inside of my PhoneGap app.
