Question

I have an stored procedure and I am using this variable i.e. @orderBy.

Here is my code below:

ORDER BY
        CASE 
            WHEN @orderBy = 'ClientName' THEN c.LastName
            WHEN @orderBy = 'EmployerName' THEN cda.Name
            WHEN @orderBy = 'EmploymentDate' THEN cda.StartDate
        END

The problem is when I’m using the @orderBy variable, it is a varchar and it is giving error on the third line:

Conversion failed when converting character string to smalldatetime data type.
Working fine if I comment third line i.e. WHEN @orderBy = 'EmploymentDate' THEN cda.StartDate

How do I get past this datatype conversion error?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use a case-per-column to remove the mixed types;

ORDER BY
    CASE WHEN @orderBy = 'ClientName' THEN c.LastName END,
    CASE WHEN @orderBy = 'EmployerName' THEN cda.Name END,
    CASE WHEN @orderBy = 'EmploymentDate' THEN cda.StartDate END