Question

I have a report with text parameters that represent Quarters and Years. For example, ‘1Q11’ represents the 1st quarter of 2011, ‘2Q13’ represents the 2nd quarter of 2013, and so on. I also have records that that have a field using this format, ‘QuarterYear’.

The issue is, I need to incorporate this into a report, to have the data only display when the quarter and year is in between those specified in the parameter. For example, if a user selects ‘1Q12’ and ‘4Q12’, the report should display all records with a QuarterYear value of ‘1Q12′,’2Q12′,’3Q12’, and ‘4Q12’. If the user selects ‘1Q12’ and ‘2Q13’, the report should display records with QuarterYear value of ‘1Q12′,’2Q12′,’3Q12′,’4Q12′,’1Q13’, and ‘2Q13’.

It is difficult for me as these are not date values so I could not use a simple BETWEEN. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

For a relatively small table, the simplest way to do this might be to use string slicing – so your condition would be something like:

where ...
right(table_quarter,2)+left(table_quarter,1) >= right(@start,2) + left(@start,1) and
right(table_quarter,2)+left(table_quarter,1) <= right(@end,2) + left(@end,1) 
...

Note that this condition is non-sargable, ie. it won’t be possible to use any indexes on your table’s quarter-year column.