Question

DETAILS table has following columns

Title  First  Second  Third  Fourth Fifth
------------------------------------------
A      null    null   null    null    null


input variable
--------------

@columns = 'Title, Third, Fourth'

I want to generate ouput as

@allcolumns = 'Title, Third, Fourth, First, Second, Fifth'

Variable @allcolumns will contain all columns from DETAILS table but with @columns first and then the remaining columns

So for instance if

@columns = 'Title, Fourth,Fifth' 

then output will be

@allcolumns = 'Title, Fourth, Fifth, First, Second, Third'

Thanks

Answer 1

This should work:

DECLARE @columns VARCHAR(max);
DECLARE @allcolumns VARCHAR(max);

SET @columns = 'Title,Fourth,Fifth';
SET @allcolumns = @columns;

SELECT @allcolumns = @allcolumns + ',' + column_name FROM
    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns WHERE
    table_name = 'DETAILS' AND
    CHARINDEX(column_name, @columns) = 0;

SELECT @allcolumns;

GO

---

An additional thought: if you want to create a SELECT statement to select the columns in the order generated by the above code, you could do this:

DECLARE @sql VARCHAR(max);
SET @sql = 'SELECT ' + @allcolumns + ' FROM DETAILS';
EXEC(@sql);

…although I can’t see why you would want to do that.