Question

I have a table, in one of the fields I stored a string like this:

RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), 'Company_Enroll_YYYY-MM-DD.csv')

I would like to use it as part of the query that I could call from my c# code, so the query would look like this:

Select ThisField, …
From mytable

Is this doable?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, just generate a SQL string by nesting.

SET NOCOUNT ON;
DECLARE @t TABLE (formula NVARCHAR(MAX));
INSERT @t(formula) SELECT 
  'RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), ''Company_Enroll_YYYY-MM-DD.csv'')';

DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX);

SELECT @sql = N'SELECT ' + formula + ', [other columns] 
  FROM dbo.mytable' FROM @t -- WHERE...;

PRINT @sql;
--EXEC sp_executesql @sql;

EDIT

Here is one way to handle the multi-row scenario:

SET NOCOUNT ON;

CREATE TABLE dbo.src(ID INT, formula NVARCHAR(MAX));
INSERT dbo.src(ID, formula) SELECT 
  1, 'RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), ''Company_Enroll_YYYY-MM-DD.csv'')'
  UNION ALL SELECT 
  2, 'RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), 'Foo_MM.DD.YYYY.csv'')';

DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX);
SET @sql = N'';

SELECT @sql = @sql + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + N'UNION ALL SELECT ID, ' + formula + '
  FROM dbo.src WHERE ID = ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(12), ID)
  FROM dbo.src -- WHERE...;

SET @sql = STUFF(@sql, 1, 12, '') + ';';

PRINT @sql;
--EXEC sp_executesql @sql;

DROP TABLE dbo.src;

This produces an ugly union query:

SELECT ID, RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), 'Company_Enroll_YYYY-MM-DD.csv')
  FROM dbo.src WHERE ID = 1
UNION ALL SELECT ID, RMaster.dbo.fnFormatDate (GETUTCDATE(), 'Foo_MM.DD.YYYY.csv')
  FROM dbo.src WHERE ID = 2;

You could probably build an awful and much more complicated CASE expression dynamically, but as long as there’s a good supporting index on ID so that each query is a single-row seek, this should be okay. The calls to the UDF are probably going to kill you more than the rest of the query anyway.