Question

I’m converting a stored procedure in some software I’m maintaining from SQL Server SQL to Informix SQL, and problems are abundant.

Basically I’m converting each section line-by-line until I have the whole thing converted.

I have the following CREATE PROCEDURE:

CREATE PROCEDURE ifxdbase:dc_buildSP (WorkID INT, CompNo smallint)
CREATE TEMP TABLE Items
(
   Code smallint,
   Qty int,
   Total int
);

INSERT INTO Items
SELECT 
   tblDetails.code, 
   tblDetails.quantity,
   tblHead.quantity
FROM
   tblHead
INNER JOIN tblDetails ON (tblDetails.compno = tblDetails.compno AND tblDetails.id_num = tblHead.id_num)
WHERE tblHead.compno = CompNo AND tblHead.id_num = WorkID;
--ORDER BY tblDetails.code;

DROP TABLE Items;
END PROCEDURE

As it stands, this works fine, but when I uncomment the line --ORDER BY tblDetails.seqno; (and remove the semicolon from the previous line) I get a “-201 A syntax error has occurred” error.

Basically tblHead is a series of order headers and tblDetails is a table of the details of each of those orders. Selecting and joining the data works fine, trying to order it fails.

Ordering should work with anything from the original SELECT, IIRC, so I can’t see what could be going wrong, here…

Answer 1

As stated here:

….. not all clauses and options of
the SELECT statement are available for
you to use in a query within an
INSERT statement. The following SELECT
clauses and options are not supported
by Informix in an INSERT statement:

FIRST and INTO TEMP

ORDER BY and UNION

so ORDER BY is not supported in the INSERT command in Informix.

I don’t have something to test right now, but you could try something like this, as a workaround:

INSERT INTO Items
SELECT code, dQuantity, hQuantity
  FROM (
    SELECT 
     tblDetails.code, 
     tblDetails.quantity dQuantity,
     tblHead.quantity hQuantity
    FROM
     tblHead
    INNER JOIN tblDetails ON (tblDetails.compno = tblDetails.compno AND tblDetails.id_num = tblHead.id_num)
    WHERE tblHead.compno = CompNo AND tblHead.id_num = WorkID;
    ORDER BY tblDetails.code
  );