Sets or returns the relative position of a Field object within a Fields collection. For an object not yet appended to the Fields collection, this property is read/write.
Settings and Return Values
The setting or return value is an Integer that specifies the numeric order of fields. The default is 0.
Remarks
The availability of the OrdinalPosition property depends on the object that contains the Fields collection, as shown in the following table.
| If the Fields collection belongs to a | Then OrdinalPosition is |
| Index object | Not supported |
| QueryDef object | Read-only |
| Recordset object | Read-only |
| Relation object | Not supported |
| TableDef object | Read/write |
Generally, the ordinal position of an object that you append to a collection depends on the order in which you append the object. The first appended object is in the first position (0), the second appended object is in the second position (1), and so on. The last appended object is in ordinal position count – 1, where count is the number of objects in the collection as specified by the Count property setting.
You can use the OrdinalPosition property to specify an ordinal position for new Field objects that differs from the order in which you append those objects to a collection. This enables you to specify a field order for your tables, queries, and recordsets when you use them in an application. For example, the order in which fields are returned in a SELECT * query is determined by the current OrdinalPosition property values.
You can permanently reset the order in which fields are returned in recordsets by setting the OrdinalPosition property to any positive integer.
Two or more Field objects in the same collection can have the same OrdinalPosition property value, in which case they will be ordered alphabetically. For example, if you have a field named Age set to 4 and you set a second field named Weight to 4, Weight is returned after Age.
You can specify a number that is greater than the number of fields minus 1. The field will be returned in an order relative to the largest number. For example, if you set a field's OrdinalPosition property to 20 (and there are only 5 fields) and you've set the OrdinalPosition property for two other fields to 10 and 30, respectively, the field set to 20 is returned between the fields set to 10 and 30.
Note Even if the Fields collection of a TableDef has not been refreshed, the field order in a Recordset opened from the TableDef will reflect the OrdinalPosition data of the TableDef object. A table-type Recordset will have the same OrdinalPosition data as the underlying table, but any other type of Recordset will have new OrdinalPosition data (starting with 0) that follow the order determined by the OrdinalPosition data of the TableDef.