Question

I have a parent / child table as shown below with a one to many relationship on the EmailQueueAttachments table.

The parent table (EmailQueue) has one row and two related rows in the child table (EmailQueueAttachments) and after writing a simple join query I get the below results.

SELECT     EmailQueue.ID, EmailQueue.SenderAddress, EmailQueue.RecipientList, EmailQueue.CCList, EmailQueue.Subject, EmailQueue.Body, EmailQueue.BodyHTML, 
                      EmailQueue.DisclaimerFooter, EmailQueue.Sent, EmailQueue.SendError, EmailQueue.CreatedDate,EmailQueueAttachments.AttachmentPath
FROM         EmailQueue LEFT OUTER JOIN
                      EmailQueueAttachments ON EmailQueue.ID = EmailQueueAttachments.EmailQueueID
WHERE     (EmailQueue.Sent = 0) AND (EmailQueue.SendError = 0) AND (EmailQueue.BodyHTML IS NULL)

---

4   xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx NULL    xxxxxxx 0   0   10/07/2012 11:58    \\server\orange.png
4   xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx NULL    xxxxxxx 0   0   10/07/2012 11:58    \\server\pear.png

Is there a simple way to return one row with the AttachmentPath column from the child table as a csv or do I need to write a stored procedure and use temp tables to achieve this?

Answer 1

This should give you the paths in one column as a comma separated list.

N.B. I did not test so there may be typos.

SELECT  EmailQueue.ID, EmailQueue.SenderAddress, EmailQueue.RecipientList,
        EmailQueue.CCList, EmailQueue.Subject, EmailQueue.Body, EmailQueue.BodyHTML,
        EmailQueue.DisclaimerFooter, EmailQueue.Sent, EmailQueue.SendError, 
        EmailQueue.CreatedDate,
        substring((SELECT ( ', ' + EQA.AttachmentPath)
                           FROM EmailQueueAttachments EQA
                           WHERE EmailQueue.ID = EQA.EmailQueueID
                           FOR XML PATH( '' )
                          ), 3, 1000 ) as [Path List]
FROM EmailQueue 
WHERE   
     (EmailQueue.Sent = 0) AND (EmailQueue.SendError = 0) AND (EmailQueue.BodyHTML IS NULL)