Question

ColumnName  IsOrdered    Seq_ID
ABC          2              2
DEF          1              1
GHI          0             NULL
JKL          1              4
MNO          1              3
PQR          0              5

I have a table (table1) in the database with above values stored in it.

Note: –

I. Is_Ordered column: 2 –> Desc; 1 –> Asc; 0 –> Default.

II. Seq_ID column: Column names ‘order by’ sequence

These values are stored in the above table by user.(i.e. on User interface). I want to produce a ‘order by’ clause from the multiple rows to a single statement with comma ‘,’ seperated (one single column).

eg: select * from Table1 order by DEF asc, ABC desc, MNO asc, JKL asc

Here I want to write a sql statement to produce just the order by statement as above shown i.e. (order by DEF asc, ABC desc, MNO asc, JKL asc)

Here you will notice that GHI column and PQR columns are not included since these two are not selected in the order by selections in the user interface.

I thank you in advance who tried to understand my question and given an appropriate solution for this.

Answer 1

Here you go (may need to add a CAST)

SELECT
    'ORDER BY ' +
      SUBSTRING(
      (
      SELECT
          ',' + ColumnName + 
               CASE IsOrdered  
                 WHEN 1 THEN 'ASC'
                 WHEN 2 THEN 'DESC'
               END
      FROM
          MyTable
      WHERE
          IsOrdered > 0 -- why have "IsIncluded" column ?
      ORDER BY
          Seq_ID
      FOR XML PATH ('')
      )
      , 2, 7999)