Question

I am trying to make a new view using in MSSql 2008 from three tables:
Table 1 has customer id and transaction id
Table 1

CustomerID      TransactionID   
1                        1
1                        2

Table 2 has Purchases Transaction and Products ID

TransactionID    ProductID 
1                     x
2                     y

Table 3 has Products Names

ProductID   Name  
1            x
2            y

I view I would like to make should show

CustomerID  Product Name
1              x, y

When I use the following query:

SELECT     table1. CustomerID, table3.Name 

FROM         table1 LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      Table2 ON table2. TransactionID    = table1.VisitId LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      Table3 ON table2. ProductID  = Table3. ProductID 

                      GROUP BY table1. CustomerID, table3.Name

I get

CustomerID  Product Name
1           x
1           y

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

One way to do this is to use a user defined function, something like:

SELECT table1.CustomerID, dbo.BuildStringOfCustomerProductNames(table1.CustomerID)
FROM table1

And create a user defined function like: dbo.BuildStringOfCustomerProductNames
that takes a customerid as input.
Inside there, you can run a query to loop through the table 2 and table 3 joined records to make a string, and return that.

Off hand I can’t think of any other simple way to do it.