Question

I have a table called “Sentence” that has the following fields:

ID         <--- OK
NextID     <--- FK To ID
Text

So if I had the following records:

*ID*            *NextID*          *Text*
1               12                The quick
3               40                jumps over
5               null              lazy dog.
12              3                 brown fox
40              5                 the

If I know that the beginning of the sequence is the record with ID = 1, is there a way to order a query based on the sequence of the NextID. As with the example above, the expected result should be…

The quick
brown fox
jumps over
the
lazy dog.

I am looking for either a T-SQL statement/s or somehow do this with Linq. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

try this:

declare @YourTable table (RowID int primary key, NextID int, TextValue varchar(50))

INSERT INTO @YourTable VALUES (1 , 12  ,'The quick')
INSERT INTO @YourTable VALUES (3 , 40  ,'jumps over')
INSERT INTO @YourTable VALUES (5 , null,'lazy dog.')
INSERT INTO @YourTable VALUES (12, 3   ,'brown fox')
INSERT INTO @YourTable VALUES (40, 5   ,'the')

;with cteview as (
SELECT * FROM @YourTable WHERE RowID=1
UNION ALL
SELECT y.* FROM @YourTable y
    INNER JOIN cteview   c ON y.RowID=c.NextID
) 
select * from cteview
OPTION (MAXRECURSION 9999) --go beyond default 100 levels of recursion to 9999 levels

OUTPUT:

RowID       NextID      TextValue
----------- ----------- --------------------------------------------------
1           12          The quick
12          3           brown fox
3           40          jumps over
40          5           the
5           NULL        lazy dog.

(5 row(s) affected)