Question

I’m looking for a way to loop through the columns of a table to generate an output as described below.

The table looks like that:

 ID  Name     OPTION1 OPTION2 OPTION3 OPTION4 OPTION5 1   MyName1  1       0       1       1       0 2   MyName2  0       0       1       0       0 

And the output looks like that:

 MyName1 -> OPTION1, OPTION3, OPTION4 MyName2 -> OPTION3 

Any directions of doing this simply would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, I suppose I’ll have to use a cursor or a temporary table… The database engine is MSSQL. The reason I’m doing formatting at the database level is to feed its output into a limited programmable environment.

Update: the ouput can by in any form, a string or rows of strings.

Update: Would the be a way to accomplish that by building a string using @str = @str + … ?

Update: I changed the output… this should be easier.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, in case of a known number of columns, you can do:

SELECT     MyName + ' ->'   + case OPTION1 when 1 then ' OPTION1' else '' end   + case OPTION2 when 1 then ' OPTION2' else '' end   + ... FROM  Table 

If columns are unknown when you create the query – I’d probably still go that way with some dynamically created SQL. The advantage is that the code probably does what you wants and is very simple.