Recently I came across a problem that I thought would be a straight forward solution however creating Sort Order’s in Classic ASP using VBScript is not a simply task.    Basically what I wanted was to create a rolling list of the Calendar months that would be sorted by current month first, then in it’s usual order for example if the current Month  is May the list should be displayed like so:

• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• January
• February
• March
• April

Then the list should dynamically change when the current month changes.    My solution involved creating a function that connects to a table in a database that contains the list of Months associated with and Relevent id:

| Months Table | – -

ID	MonthName
1	January
2	February
3	March
4	April
5	May
6	June
7	July
8	August
9	September
10	October
11	November
12	December

I would then get an Integer value  for the current month, so for example if the current month is May the Integer Value would be 5, you can combine the VBScript functions Month() and Now like so Month(now)to perform this This is then stored in an Array called currentMonthNumber like:

currentMonthNumber = Month(now)

Now you have this value you can create a Do Until Loop and and If then statement to compare the ID’s from the Month’s Table and if they are less than the current Month integer you can add the value of 12 so that now you have a Sort Order id for instance

ID	MonthName	SortOrderID
1	January	13
2	February	14
3	March	15
4	April	16
5	May	5
6	June	6
7	July	7
8	August	8
9	September	9
10	October	10
11	November	11
12	December	12

The Month Name  and associated Sort Order ID would then be added to a Dictionary Object (which is a type of array that stores values as a name/value pair)

Once the dictionary object  has stored the values we can do a For Each Loop and add the values to a Disconnected recordset.  The reason we use a disconnected recordet is that it allows us to sort the order of the monthNames by the sortid like so:

monthRst.sort = “sortid ASC”

The full code is shown below:

‘—————————————————–

Function orderMonthByCurrentMonth()

set conn = createobject(“adodb.connection”)

conn.open dsn

set rst = createobject(“adodb.recordset”)

sql = “SELECT * FROM monthNames ORDER BY id ASC”

rst.open sql,conn

Dim monthDictionaryObject, currentMonthNumber, rollingId
Dim monthRst
currentMonthNumber = Month(now)

Set monthDictionaryObject = CreateObject(“Scripting.Dictionary”)
Set monthRst = CreateObject(“adodb.recordset”)

If not rst.eof then
do until rst.eof
If rst(“id”)<currentMonthNumber then
rollingId = rst(“id”) + 12
else
rollingid = rst(“id”)
End if

monthDictionaryObject.add “”&(rst(“monthName”)),”"&rollingid

rst.movenext
loop
end if

monthRst.Fields.Append “month1″, 8, 255
monthRst.Fields.Append “sortid”, 3
‘monthRst.Fields.Append “monthid”, 3
monthRst.Open

For Each item In monthDictionaryObject
monthRst.AddNew
monthRst.Fields.Item(“month1″).Value = item
monthRst.Fields.Item(“sortid”).Value = monthDictionaryObject.item(item)

Next

monthRst.sort = “sortid ASC”

If not monthrst.eof then
do until monthrst.eof
%><li><%=monthRst.Fields.Item(“month1″).Value%></li><%
monthrst.movenext
loop
end if

End Function