Sorting by Month in delphi - delphi

Question

I am using Delphi 7 and Ms access 2007. I have a table called IndividualAccounts with the following field names in Ms access: Serial number, names, month paid, year paid. I have the following code to generate a report on a specific serial number I input.
procedure TReportsForm.BitBtn1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
qry :string;
begin
open;
SQL.Clear;
qry:= 'select*from IndividualAccount WHERE (((IndividualAccount.[Serial Number])=1))ORDER BY IndividualAccount.[Year Paid]';
SQL.Add(qry);
Active:= True;
reportform1.QuickRep1.Preview;
end;
I want to sort the report according to the calendar month order that is from January to December and year paid. What code can I add above to generate a report which orders the months in calendar order?

Answer 1

Assuming that the month paid and year paid columns are numbers and not strings, your query would need to look like this:
qry := 'SELECT * FROM IndividualAccount WHERE ((IndividualAccount.[Serial Number]) = 1) ORDER BY IndividualAccount.[Year Paid], IndividualAccount.[Month Paid]';
The rows will be sorted by year paid first, and then any rows that have the same year will be sorted by month paid.
A better solution would be to change the database to have a new date paid column that uses SQL's DATETIME date type. If you don't want to lose the existing month paid and year paid columns, you could create date paid as a calculated column that returns a DATETIME value calculated from the month paid and year paid column values using SQL's DateSerial() function (or change the month paid and year paid columns into calculated columns that use SQL's DatePart() or Month()/Year() functions to pull apart the value of the date paid column). Then you can sort rows in calendar order by sorting on the date paid column by itself:
qry := 'SELECT * FROM IndividualAccount WHERE ((IndividualAccount.[Serial Number]) = 1) ORDER BY IndividualAccount.[Date Paid]';