Let's assume you have a nodes
tables like this:
CREATE TABLE nodes ( node serial PRIMARY KEY, parent integer NULL REFERENCES nodes(node), ts timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT now());
It represents a standard node-like tree structure with root nodes at the top and several child nodes dangling from root nodes or other child nodes.
Let us insert a couple of example values:
INSERT INTO nodes (parent) VALUES (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (1), (1), (1), (1), (6), (1), (6), (9), (6), (6), (3), (3), (3), (15);
Now I want to retrieve the first 10 root nodes and all their children up to a depth of 4:
WITH RECURSIVE node_rec AS ( (SELECT 1 AS depth, * FROM nodes WHERE parent IS NULL LIMIT 10) UNION ALL SELECT depth + 1, n.* FROM nodes AS n JOIN node_rec ON (n.parent = node_rec.node) WHERE depth < 4)SELECT * FROM node_rec;
This works great and gives me the following result:
depth | node | parent -------+------+-------- 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 1 2 | 6 | 1 2 | 7 | 1 2 | 8 | 1 2 | 10 | 1 2 | 15 | 3 2 | 16 | 3 2 | 17 | 3 3 | 9 | 6 3 | 11 | 6 3 | 13 | 6 3 | 14 | 6 3 | 18 | 15 4 | 12 | 9
As you might have noticed, there's no ORDER BY
clause, so the order is not defined. The order you see here is from root nodes to deeper nodes.
How would I order the results as they would appear in an expanded tree view, as you can see from the example picture below?
I basically want the child nodes to be placed right after their corresponding parent node. If two or more child nodes have the same parent node, I want them to be sorted by their timestamp. Based on the example above, here's the desired output order that I'm trying to achieve:
depth | node | parent | ts-------+------+--------+--------- 1 | 1 | | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 2 | 5 | 1 | 2014-01-01 00:10:00 2 | 6 | 1 | 2014-01-01 00:20:00 3 | 9 | 6 | 2014-01-01 00:25:00 4 | 12 | 9 | 2014-01-01 00:27:00 3 | 11 | 6 | 2014-01-01 00:26:00 3 | 13 | 6 | 2014-01-01 00:30:00 3 | 14 | 6 | 2014-01-01 00:36:00 2 | 7 | 1 | 2014-01-01 00:21:00 2 | 8 | 1 | 2014-01-01 00:22:00 2 | 10 | 1 | 2014-01-01 00:23:00 1 | 2 | | 2014-01-01 00:08:00 1 | 3 | | 2014-01-01 00:09:00 2 | 15 | 3 | 2014-01-01 10:00:00 3 | 18 | 15 | 2014-01-01 11:05:00 2 | 16 | 3 | 2014-01-01 11:00:00 2 | 17 | 3 | 2014-01-01 12:00:00 1 | 4 | | 2014-01-01 00:10:00