I think you're right and using an IF is ultimately the right answer.
However just substituting issuenum for issuedate doesn't do the right
thing.
Looking at my sorting a bit more analytically I think that what I need
to do is, WHEN there isn't a month number, THEN substitute the
existing month nu
That should be fairly easy. What you are looking to do is have your sort field conditional. The ORDER BY doesn't have to specify a
database field, it can be any field in your query. So you could do something like this:
SELECT IF( issuemonth IS NULL, issuenum, issuedate) AS sortfield, issuedate,
