ID's in phpmyadmin

I have a table in my phpmyadmin that contains some data for items that will be posted on a website. I'm adding these rows to the database manually. I want to show the number of the posted item. The first one will be '1', second one will be '2', etc. However if I use auto increment and delete the 2nd row there will be a gap in between. Suggestions to开发者_开发技巧 fix this?

I used PHP to display the ID of the row but when the second is deleted it shows the gap.

The structure starts with a column named 'id' which has a primary key and auto increment.

You don't want to do that! Period. You'll create yourself a lot of problems. Your real issue is somewhere else. You think not having gaps between your ids will solve it. Solve that problem differently but leave the autoincremented id column alone. It is being implemented like that for a reason. The autoincrement makes sure you will never confuse two entries, it doesn't matter if there are gaps, you can always sort, you can always identify! If you need nice straight numbers, store your entries in a numeric array and use the keys for numbering. Or loop over your entries with a for loop and use the incrementor for numbering, or introduce an order column in your database.

Suggestions to fix this?

It's not broken!

You should not care or consider database ids as a developer, it is for internal use and data integrity.

If you really want to use incrementing numbers without gaps, use this in your query:

LIMIT 1 OFFSET X

Where X is the "id" in your url (not the real id).

However, listen to the folks here that are advising against this. It's not a very good idea and trust me, no one will care or even notice the forward facing database ids.