Question

I have a data set that looks something like this:

   Gender | Age | Name
    Male  | 30  | Bill
  Female  | 27  | Jenny
  Female  | 27  | Debby 
   Male   | 44  | Frank

And I’m trying to display this as specially formatted HTML code:

    <ul>
      <li>Male
        <ul>
          <li>30
            <ul>
              <li>Bill</li>
            </ul>
          </li>
          <li>44
            <ul>
              <li>Frank</li>
            </ul>
          </li>
        </ul>  
      </li>
    </ul>

    <ul>
      <li>Female
        <ul>
          <li>27
            <ul>
              <li>Jenny</li>
              <li>Debby</li>
            </ul>
          </li>
        </ul>  
      </li>
    </ul>

I tried using FOR XML but that didn’t give the results I was looking for. It didn’t remove the multiple Gender and Age fields returned. As you can see in this HTML it is compounding it all and only giving duplicates at the end node.

Aaron Bertrand provided an excellent method here Return Select Statement as formatted HTML that seems to work perfectly in SQL 2008, but I was looking for something that worked in 2005 as well, besides the little stuff, like += operators and setting default DECLARE values, just doesn’t display in 2005.

How would something like this be achieved in SQL Server 2005?

Answer 1

declare @T table
(
  Gender varchar(10),
  Age int,
  Name varchar(10)
)

insert into @T values ('Male',   30,   'Bill')
insert into @T values ('Female', 27,   'Jenny')
insert into @T values ('Female', 27,   'Debby') 
insert into @T values ('Male',   44,   'Frank')

select Gender as 'li',
       (select T2.Age as 'li',
               (select T3.Name as 'li'
                from @T as T3
                where T2.Age = T3.Age and
                      T1.Gender = T3.Gender
                for xml path(''), root('ul'), type) as 'li'
        from @T as T2
        where T1.Gender = T2.Gender
        group by T2.Age
        for xml path(''), root('ul'), type) as 'li'
from @T as T1
group by Gender
for xml path('ul')