Question

I have two tables, Table_1 and Table_2.

Table_1 has columns PK (autoincrementing int) and Value (nchar(10)).

Table_2 has FK (int), Key (nchar(10)) and Value (nchar(10)).

That is to say, Table_1 is a table of data and Table_2 is a key-value store where one row in Table_1 may correspond to 0, 1 or more keys and values in Table_2.

I’d like to write code that programmatically builds up a query that inserts one row into Table_1 and a variable number of rows into Table_2 using the primary key from Table_1.

I can do it easy with one row:

INSERT INTO Table_1 ([Value])
OUTPUT INSERTED.PK, 'Test1Key', 'Test1Val' INTO Table_2 (FK, [Key], [Value])
VALUES ('Test')

But SQL doesn’t seem to like the idea of having multiple rows. This fails:

INSERT INTO Table_1 ([Value])
OUTPUT INSERTED.PK, 'Test1Key', 'Test1Val' INTO Table_2 (FK, [Key], [Value])
OUTPUT INSERTED.PK, 'Test2Key', 'Test2Val' INTO Table_2 (FK, [Key], [Value])
OUTPUT INSERTED.PK, 'Test3Key', 'Test3Val' INTO Table_2 (FK, [Key], [Value])
VALUES ('Test')

Is there any way to make this work?

Answer 1

I had to put the code in answer, in comment it looks ugly…

CREATE TABLE #Tmp(PK int, value nchar(10))

INSERT INTO Table_1 ([Value])
OUTPUT INSERTED.PK, inserted.[Value] INTO #Tmp
SELECT 'Test'

INSERT INTO Table_2 (FK, [Key], Value)
SELECT PK, 'Test1Key', 'Test1Val' FROM #Tmp
UNION ALL SELECT PK, 'Test2Key', 'Test2Val' FROM #Tmp
UNION ALL SELECT PK, 'Test3Key', 'Test3Val' FROM #Tmp

Btw, SQL Server won’t let you do it all in one query without some ugly hack…