Question

I have a relation mapping table like this:

attributeid bigint
productid bigint

To clean relations that are not used any more, I want to delete all recors where productid = x and attributeid not in (@includedIds), like the following example:

@attributetypeid bigint,  @productid bigint, @includedids varchar(MAX)     DELETE FROM reltable  WHERE productid = @productid AND  attributetypeid = @attributetypeid AND  attributeid NOT IN (@includedids); 

When running the SQL with the includedids param containing more than 1 id – like this: 25,26 – I get a SqlException saying:

Error converting data type varchar to bigint.

And that is of course due to the , in that varchar(max) param…

How should I construct my delete statement to make it work?

Answer 1

  SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON   GO   CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ListToTable] (   /*   FUNCTION ListToTable   Usage: select entry from listtotable('abc,def,ghi') order by entry desc   PURPOSE: Takes a comma-delimited list as a parameter and returns the values of that list into a table variable.   */   @mylist varchar(8000)   )   RETURNS @ListTable TABLE (   seqid int not null,   entry varchar(255) not null)    AS    BEGIN       DECLARE            @this varchar(255),            @rest varchar(8000),           @pos int,           @seqid int        SET @this = ' '       SET @seqid = 1       SET @rest = @mylist       SET @pos = PATINDEX('%,%', @rest)       WHILE (@pos > 0)       BEGIN           set @this=substring(@rest,1,@pos-1)           set @rest=substring(@rest,@pos+1,len(@rest)-@pos)           INSERT INTO @ListTable (seqid,entry)  VALUES (@seqid,@this)           SET @pos= PATINDEX('%,%', @rest)           SET @seqid=@seqid+1       END       set @this=@rest       INSERT INTO @ListTable (seqid,entry) VALUES (@seqid,@this)       RETURN    END 

Run that script in your SQL Server database to create the function ListToTable. Now, you can rewrite your query like so:

@attributetypeid bigint,  @productid bigint, @includedids varchar(MAX)     DELETE FROM reltable  WHERE productid = @productid AND  attributetypeid = @attributetypeid AND  attributeid NOT IN (SELECT entry FROM ListToTable(@includedids)); 

Where @includedids is a comma delimited list that you provide. I use this function all the time when working with lists. Keep in mind this function does not necessarily sanitize your inputs, it just looks for character data in a comma delimited list and puts each element into a record. Hope this helps.