Question

I have a customer table that I want to use to populate a parameter box in SSRS 2008. The cust_num is the value and the concatenation of the cust_name and cust_addr will be the label. The required fields from the table are:

cust_num     int            PK
cust_name    char(50)       not null
cust_addr    char(50)

The SQL is:

select cust_num, cust_name + isnull(cust_addr, '') address
from customers

Which gives me this in the parameter list:

FIRST OUTPUT - ACTUAL
1       cust1              addr1
2       customer2               addr2

Which is what I expected but I want:

SECOND OUTPUT - DESIRED
1       cust1              addr1
2       customer2          addr2

What I have tried:

select cust_num, rtrim(cust_name) + space(60 - len(cust_name)) +
                 rtrim(cust_addr) + space(60 - len(cust_addr)) customer
from customers

Which gives me the first output.

select cust_num, rtrim(cust_name) + replicate(char(32), 60 - len(cust_name)) +
                 rtrim(cust_addr) + replicate(char(32), 60 - len(cust_addr)) customer

Which also gives me the first output.

I have also tried replacing space() with char(32) and vice versa

I have tried variations of substring, left, right all to no avail.

I have also used ltrim and rtrim in various spots.

The reason for the 60 is that I have checked the max length in both fields and it is 50 and I want some whitespace between the fields even if the field is maxed. I am not really concerned about truncated data since the city, state, and zip are in different fields so if the end of the street address is chopped off it is ok, I guess.

This is not a show stopper, the SSRS report is currently deployed with the first output but I would like to make it cleaner if I can.

Answer 1

Whammo blammo (for leading spaces):

SELECT 
    RIGHT(space(60) + cust_name, 60),
    RIGHT(space(60) + cust_address, 60)

OR (for trailing spaces)

SELECT
    LEFT(cust_name + space(60), 60),
    LEFT(cust_address + space(60), 60),