Question

I have a table that looks like this

OutputTablesID    Label    ColumnOrder
  236             text          1
  236             text          2
  236             text          3
   .                .           .
   .                .           .
   .                .           . 
  236             text         25

I need the table to look like this

OutputTablesID   1>>2>>3>>4>>5>>6>>7>>8>>9>>10>>11>>12>>13>>14>>15

 236>>>>>>>>>Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text

I have tried code that I used from an existing pivot table I have but I cannot use Label in the aggregate function because it is a text string.

This is my attempt at the pivot table

 Create  FUNCTION [dbo].[ColOrder] 
(   
)

RETURNS TABLE 

AS

RETURN 

(
   SELECT     OutputTablesId, Label, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12
    from 
    (
       SELECT OCL.Label, OCL.OutputTablesId
       FROM OCL
    ) AS D
    PIVOT 
    (
        sum(Label) 
        FOR ColumnOrder IN ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12])
    ) AS P

Thank you for your comments and suggestions!

Answer 1

Your code is very close but you are trying to use a sum() on a varchar which will not work. If you change the aggregate function to max() then it should work:

select OutputTablesID, [1], [2], [3], [25]
from
(
  select OutputTablesID, Label, ColumnOrder
  from yourtable
) src
pivot
(
  max(label)
  for ColumnOrder in ([1], [2], [3], [25]) -- put other ColumnOrder values here
) piv

See SQL Fiddle with Demo

If you want to create this as a function, then you can use:

create function dbo.colorder()
returns table
as
return
select OutputTablesID, [1], [2], [3], [25]
from
(
  select OutputTablesID, Label, ColumnOrder
  from yourtable
) src
pivot
(
  max(label)
  for ColumnOrder in ([1], [2], [3], [25])  -- put other ColumnOrder values here
) piv

See SQL Fiddle with Demo

The result is:

| OUTPUTTABLESID |    1 |    2 |    3 |   25 |
----------------------------------------------
|            236 | text | text | text | text |