Question

I am working on a stored procedure that will trigger once a week so I am not worried about speed as much as getting the thing to work.

What I am trying to do is loop through a table called households that stores information about the houses, then using the houseid looping through a table called individuals which will returns more than one person therefore leading me to loop through that result to gather information.

My main goal is to concatenate all the names of the people in the household, and their codes

declare @RowNum int,
    @houseId nchar(10), 
    @hid nchar(25) 

    select @houseId=MAX(ID) FROM households     --start with the highest ID 
    Select @RowNum = Count(*) From households      --get total number of records
    WHILE @RowNum > 0                          --loop until no more records BEGIN       

    select @hid = id from households where ID = @houseid    --get other info from that row  

    DECLARE @RowCount INT

    SET @RowCount = (SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM (select id, firstname,lastname,party_code from indviduals where householdid = @houseid) as table1)  
    DECLARE @code1 VARCHAR(50), @names1 VARCHAR(500), @lastname1 VARCHAR(50) 
    -- Declare an iterator
    DECLARE @I INT
    -- Initialize the iterator
    SET @I = (select min(id) from indviduals where householdid = @houseid)

    -- Loop through the rows of a table @myTable
    WHILE (@I <= @RowCount)
    BEGIN
            -- Declare variables to hold the data which we get after looping each record 
            DECLARE @code VARCHAR(50), @names VARCHAR(500), @lastname VARCHAR(50)    

            -- Get the data from table and set to variables
            SELECT @code = party_code, @names = firstname, @lastname = lastname FROM (select id, firstname,lastname,party_code from indviduals where householdid = @houseid) as table1  WHERE ID = @I
            -- Display the looped data



    set @code1 = (@code + ',' + @code1)
    set @names1 = (@names + ',' + @names1)
    set @lastname1 = @lastname
            -- Increment the iterator
            SET @I = @I  + 1
    END

    update households    
    SET firstnames=@names1, lastname=@lastname1, party_codes=@code1,
    where id = @houseid  

    select top 1 @houseId=ID 
    from households
    where ID < @houseID 
    order by ID desc --get the next one    

     set @RowNum = @RowNum - 1                              
     END 


household table
    1 bekshire st   dell    MA  10001   02639   50  0002    dell    NULL    ALRGEN  1   BERKSHIRE ST    NULL    NULL    NULL    NULL

individuals that belong to household id 10001
first    last     code
BOB BUILDER     U
JESS     BUILDER  A

i want 

1 bekshire st   dell    MA  10001   02639   50  0002    dell    NULL    ALRGEN  1   BERKSHIRE ST    BOB,JESS    BUILDER U,A 

Answer 1

If you are having to concatenate data to get it into the table, then your design is wrong. Please read up on normalization. A concatenated list should not be stored in a field. Each field in each row of data should have no more than 1 piece of information. What you need are related tables.