I kind of have the same view as Jonathan, if a doctor prescribes certain medications and they need them to be administered in the order in which they were prescribed, i would imagine that the ordering is already sequential based on the effective start date and not order number. This implies if you edit a drug order and don’t change anything that would affect the effective start date then the new revised order shouldn’t fall out of order based on start date.
I’m also not thrilled by adding sort_weight as a new column, if other requirements keep coming up, are we just going to keep expanding the table? Order entry doesn’t seem to be a trivial thing especially when it comes to workflows and such needs will always crop up. I thought this is what attribute types are meant for, to take care of such requirements that don’t cut across the larger group but rather implementation specific. How about we add order attribute types? Then an implementation can have an attribute type they can use to do what they need to do.