SQLite Order by WHERE IN clause [duplicate] - sqlite

Question

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SQLite and custom order by
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Query Sqlite Database by specific/custom ordering?
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Closed 5 years ago.
I'm using SQLite and I'm providing a list of id values to retrieve. However, the order of those id values is important and I want to retrieve the records in the same order.
For example,
SELECT
*
FROM
todos
WHERE
todos.id in ( 1, 3, 2, 4 )
This returns:
1
2
3
4
But I want it to return in the same order as the provided id values, like this:
1
3
2
4
I've seen answers for MySQL and PostgreSQL but not for SQLite.

Answer 1

ORDER BY CASE id WHEN x THEN y
Found it in an obscure SQLite forum.
There's a neat way of ordering things that is very specific but lends itself to be programmatically generated.
To achieve the desired order, you can use the following:
SELECT
*
FROM
todos
WHERE
todos.id in ( 1, 3, 2, 4 )
ORDER BY
CASE todos.id
WHEN 1 THEN 1
WHEN 3 THEN 2
WHEN 2 THEN 3
WHEN 4 THEN 4
END
This returns the records in the following order:
1
3
2
4
As you can see, you're manually specifying the order of each record. This would be laborious if you were doing this manually, but this can be easily programmed and appended to a query, if you're using a programming language.
For example, I'm using this with Android/Java and ended up doing something like this to generate this ORDER BY clause:
String orderBy = "CASE todos.id ";
int i = 1;
for ( int id : ids ) {
orderBy = orderBy.concat( " WHEN " + id + "' THEN " + i );
i++;
}
orderBy = orderBy.concat( " END");
// Append `orderBy` to your normal SQLite query.