Question

I have some tables in SQL Server 2005:

• Product: ID, Name
• Category: ID, Name
• Tags: ID, tagName
• ProductCategory: productId, tagId
• CategoryTags: categoryId, tagId

Basically I need a query that will display the category and list of tags associated for each product on ONE line.

For example, there are 3 categories: Animals, Countries, Color.

Each one of those have a bunch of tags.

Lets say that Product 1 has a bunch of tags associated such as: bird, duck, dog, canada, russia, japan, black, red, white

I need the query result to be in the format:

productId, [Category:tag,tag,tag;Category:tag,tag,tag:Category:tag,tag,tag]

1, [Animal:bird,duck,dog;Country:canada,russia,japan;Color:black,red,white]

The text in the square brackets should be in one column returned by SQL.

I found something similar here: Concatenate many rows into a single text string?

But I need to take it a step further and have it all on one line instead of it returning the different categories on separate rows.

Kinda hard to explain but hope you get it.

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Thanks for everyone’s help and input. Really appreciate it!
Here is what I have so far which is close, but not quite there yet. Perhaps it’ll help you figure it out for me 😀

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/eed14/5

Answer 1

This is a really ugly way to get this data into a single string. But you can use something like this:

select distinct 
  p.name ProductName,
  STUFF((SELECT distinct ', ' + 
           c.name +':'+ STUFF((SELECT DISTINCT ', ' + Name 
                               FROM tags t
                               LEFT JOIN CategoryTags ct
                                  on t.id = ct.tagid
                               WHERE c.id = ct.categoryid
                               FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '')
         FROM category c 
         LEFT JOIN CategoryTags ct
           ON ct.categoryid = c.id
         LEFT JOIN productcategory pc
           ON pc.tagid = ct.tagid
         WHERE p.id = pc.productid
         FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '')  List
from product p

See SQL Fiddle with Demo

The result is:

| PRODUCTNAME |                                                                               LIST |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|        Test |  Animal: Bird, dog, duck, Color: black, red, white, Country: canada, japan, russia |

Edit #1: This is producing the result that you want:

select distinct 
  p.name ProductName,
  STUFF((SELECT distinct '; ' + 
           c.name +':'+ STUFF((SELECT DISTINCT ', ' + Name 
                               FROM catalogTags t
                               LEFT JOIN catalogProductTags pt
                                 on t.id = pt.catalogTagId
                               LEFT JOIN catalogCategoryTags ct
                                 on pt.catalogTagId = ct.catalogTagId
                               WHERE c.id = ct.catalogCategoryId
                                  AND p.id = pt.catalogProductId
                               FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '')
         FROM catalogProductTags pt
         LEFT JOIN catalogCategoryTags ct
           ON pt.catalogTagId = ct.catalogTagId
         LEFT JOIN catalogCategory c 
           ON ct.catalogCategoryId = c.id
         WHERE p.id = pt.catalogProductId
         FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '')  List
from catalogProduct p;

See SQL Fiddle with Demo. This can probably be refactored to a cleaner version.

The result is:

| PRODUCTNAME |                                                        LIST |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|     tshirt1 |                           Animals: dog; Color: black, white |
|     tshirt2 |              Animals: dog; Color: blue, red; Countries: USA |
|     tshirt3 |  Color: blue, pink, red, white; Countries: Australia, Japan |