Question

I realize this is a ridiculous request, but what I’m trying to do is pull multiple records back into a single column along with some literal text.

So given a table like this

REGION  CITY    SID
-------------------
1   Chicago     1234
1   Palatine    567
1   Algonquin   234
1   Wauconda    987

I would like to see back a single record with a column, other columns like region are fine, but a single column like this

<option value="1234">Chicago</option><option value="567">Palatine</option><option value="234">Algonquin</option><option value="987">Wauconda</option>

Any thoughts on how to do this? I’m running Oracle 9i and cannot do this in PL/SQL

---

Okay the table format has changed a bit, but the idea is the same

COUNTRY STORECODE   STORE_NAME
------------------------------
USA     1234        Chicago
USA     567         Palatine
CAN     987         Toronto

So I found this code going through the links listed

SELECT COUNTRY,
       LTRIM(MAX(SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH(STORECODE,','))
       KEEP (DENSE_RANK LAST ORDER BY curr),',') AS COUNTRY_HTML
FROM   (SELECT COUNTRY,
               STORECODE,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY COUNTRY ORDER BY STORECODE) AS curr,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY COUNTRY ORDER BY STORECODE) -1 AS prev
        FROM   tablename)
GROUP BY COUNTRY
CONNECT BY prev = PRIOR curr AND COUNTRY = PRIOR COUNTRY
START WITH curr = 1;

And when I run it I see this output

COUNTRY COUNTRY_HTML
--------------------
USA     1234,567
CAN     987

My thought was simply to have the inner select pull from another select where I do my concat of the STORECODE and STORE_NAME along with the html required like this…

SELECT COUNTRY,
       LTRIM(MAX(SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH(RECORD_HTML,','))
       KEEP (DENSE_RANK LAST ORDER BY curr),',') AS COUNTRY_HTML
FROM   (SELECT COUNTRY,
               RECORD_HTML,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY COUNTRY ORDER BY RECORD_HTML) AS curr,
               ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY COUNTRY ORDER BY RECORD_HTML) -1 AS prev
        FROM   (SELECT COUNTRY, '<option value="' || STORECODE || '">' || STORE_NAME || '</option>' AS RECORD_HTML FROM tablename))
GROUP BY COUNTRY
CONNECT BY prev = PRIOR curr AND COUNTRY = PRIOR COUNTRY
START WITH curr = 1;

While our front end environment does accept the query when I try to review the results I get a error: the resource is invalid. You may need to re-create of fix the query before viewing.

I know that error probably isn’t helpful, but any ideas why my version isn’t working?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It’s disgusting but you could do something like this:

select replace(blah2,',','')
  from ( select wm_concat(blah) as blah2
           from ( select '<option value="' || sid || '">' || city || '</option>' as blah
                    from my_table
                         )
                 )