Question

I have a simple stored procedure that is pulling data for a SS report. One of the columns uses only a letter for the value. I would like to spell out the word the letter represents for the report. The procedure looks something like this…

ALTER PROCEDURE RPT_MYREPORT
{
@PID     INT=1234567
}

AS BEGIN

SELECT
    SSN,
    DOB,
    PID,
    Name,
    MaritalStatus
FROM
    Customers
END

Obviously theres more to it but thats the basic setup. Marital Status is either an “S” for Single or “M” for Married. I would like to have these values spelled out for my report. Anyone know how?

Answer 1

Add a lookup table to your database containing the letter and the name/description you want to display. Join your main table to this in the query supplying the data to the report.

E.g. for the lookup table:

CREATE TABLE Marital_Status (
   marital_status_code char(1) PRIMARY KEY,
   marital_status_name char(7)
)

then add the lookup data

INSERT Marital_Status(marital_status_code, marital_status_name)
VALUES ('S', 'Single')
INSERT Marital_Status(marital_status_code, marital_status_name)
VALUES ('M', 'Married')

If you set the relationship between the main and lookup tables it also serves as data validation when new rows are inserted.