Question

I have the following stored procedure which takes a user ID, a starting date, an end date, and a list of codes in a comma-delimited list, and it returns all activity records between those two dates which match one of the codes in the list.

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[ActivitiesSummary] 

@UserID varchar(30),
@StartDate datetime,
@EndDate datetime,
@Codes varchar(100)

AS

BEGIN

 SET NOCOUNT ON;

 SELECT act.SectionID, act.UnitID, act.ActivityCode
 FROM dbo.Activities act INNER JOIN ConvertCodeListToTbl(@Codes) i ON act.ActivityCode = i.code
 WHERE act.ActivityDate>=@Startdate AND act.ActivityDate<@EndDate
 GROUP BY act.SectionID, act.UnitID, act.ActivityCode
 ORDER BY act.SectionID, act.UnitID, act.ActivityCode
END

ConvertCodeListToTbl(@Codes) is a function that takes a comma-delimited list of codes (e.g., ‘A0001, B0001, C0001’) and returns a table with one code per row:

A0001
B0001
C0001

This method works really well except when no codes have been selected. When that occurs, I receive no records back because @Codes=” and the last INNER JOIN returns no records.

What I want to happen: if @Codes=”, ignore the last INNER JOIN, or otherwise find a way to return all records regardless of code.

What are my options?

Answer 1

Is sounds like you need to change the INNER JOIN line to:

FROM dbo.Activities act INNER JOIN ConvertCodeListToTbl(@Codes) i 
ON (act.ActivityCode = i.code OR @Codes = '')