So my problem. I have an item which has specific attributes that the user can select from a list. Now the order of these attributes when being displayed is very important.

To illustrate:
Item: Jason
Attribute1: Eats
Attribute2: Food
Attribute3: To
Attribute4: Live

Now that's the order the user selects so when I display the item with the attributes I want to see "Jason eats food to live"

However the attributes were inserted into the database as follows
Attribute Table
ID | AttributeName
1 Lives
2 To
3 Eat
4 Food

My query is
SELECT AttributeName FROM Attributes WHERE AttributeId = 3 OR AttributeId = 4 OR AttributeId = 2 OR AttributeId = 1

However the recordset returned is automatically ordered by ID. So it becomes "Jason lives to eat food"

How can I prevent this?

PS: Nevermind my grammatical changes to the data

SELECT AttributeName FROM Attributes WHERE AttributeId in ( 3, 4, 2, 1 )
order
by case when AttributeId = 3 then 0 else 1 end
, case when AttributeId = 4 then 0 else 1 end
, case when AttributeId = 2 then 0 else 1 end
, case when AttributeId = 1 then 0 else 1 end

Thanks a bunch Rudy, that rocked.

If it's not too much to ask, what exactly does the then/else bit do?

if you would like to see how it works, please run this query --