Question

I know NTEXT is going away and that there are larger best-practices issues here (like storing XML in an NTEXT column), but I have a table containing XML from which I need to pluck a attribute value. This should be easy to do using sp_xml_preparedocument but is made more tricky by the fact that you cannot declare a local variable of type NTEXT and I cannot figure out how to use an expression to specify the XML text passed to the function. I can do it like this in SQL 2005 because of the XML or VARCHAR(MAX) datatypes, but what can I do for SQL 2000?

DECLARE @XmlHandle int DECLARE @ProfileXml xml SELECT @ProfileXml = ProfileXml FROM ImportProfile WHERE ProfileId = 1  EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @XmlHandle output, @ProfileXml  -- Pluck the Folder TemplateId out of the FldTemplateId XML attribute. SELECT FolderTemplateId FROM OPENXML( @XmlHandle, '/ImportProfile', 1) WITH(  FolderTemplateId int '@FldTemplateId' )  EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @XmlHandle 

The only thing I can come up with for SQL 2000 is to use varchar(8000). Is there really no way to use an expression like the following?

EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @XmlHandle output, (SELECT ProfileXml FROM ImportProfile WHERE ProfileId = 1) 

Answer 1

Great question.. but no solution

Thoughts:

• You can’t wrap the SELECT call in a UDF (to create a kind of dummy ntext local var)
• You can’t wrap the sp_xml_preparedocument call in a scalar UDF (to use in SELECT) because you can’t call extended stored procs
• You can’t concatenate a call to run dynamically because you’ll hit string limits and scop issues
• Ditto a self call using OPENQUERY
• textptr + READTEXT can’t be added as a parameter to sp_xml_preparedocument

So why does sp_xml_preparedocument take ntext as a datatype?