Best way to save a ordered List to the Database while keeping the ordering

Question

I was wondering if anyone has a good solution to a problem I\'ve encountered numerous times during the last years.

I have a shopping cart and my customer explicitly

Answer 1

Well, I would say the short answer is:

Create a primary key of autoidentity in the cartcontents table, then insert rows in the correct top-down order. Then by selecting from the table with order by the primary key autoidentity column would give you the same list. By doing this you have to delete all items and reinsert then in case of alterations to the cart contents. (But that is still quite a clean way of doing it) If that's not feasible, then go with the order column like suggested by others.