Question

I have a single table with no relations. When the field countyName is a zero length string I need Statewide to be in the result set. Otherwise, I need then value of the field to stay as it is, e.g.: notice how in the second column there is ‘Statewide’ and ‘countyName’. countyName should be the original value actually stored in the database.

`countyName`  `address`
               blah blah
Jackson        blah blah

needs to be (first rows on both examples are column names)

countyName     address
Statewide      blah blah
Jackson        blah blah

Here’s what I tried, you can ignore the rest of the fields in this example

select case servicetype
       when 'cr' then 'Community Resource'
       when 'ed' then 'Education'
       when 'fb' then 'Faith-based'
       when 'me' then 'Medical Equipment'
       when 'hc' then 'Health Care'
       else 'Other' 
       end as serviceType

       ,case countyName
       when '' then 'Statewide'
       else 'countyname' end

       ,name
       ,physicaladdress
       ,city
       ,statelocation
       ,zip
       ,phone
       ,website
       from main

      order by countyName, servicetype, name

Answer 1

Despite not saying exactly what results you’re expect, my guess would be that you don’t want to return the literal of ‘countyname’. What you want is the value in the column.

So try replace the current case statement with…

,case countyName
when '' then 'Statewide'
else countyName end

As an extra safety net, you can also check for NULL values using ISNULL…

,case ISNULL(countyName,'')
when '' then 'Statewide'
else countyName end