PLSQL order by issue

Question

Rolled back to revision one, then edited somewhat. See revised question.

I have an interesting issue with the below SELECT.

Its about ORDER BY clause; I am

Answer 1

Try to select the ORDER BY clause as a separate column using the DECODE() function:

SELECT DECODE(p_sortby, 'ID', gl.group_id, 'NAME', group_name) AS sort, ...
...
ORDER BY 1

Edit:

I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't work". If you mean that member_count is not sorted as you expect, use TO_CHAR(gl.member_count, '000000') to enforce a formatted string conversion. (adjust format mask to expected number of digits)