Question

I’m trying to figure out a select statement that will truncate a field value to 100 characters and add … to the end of it so like:

HundredLetterSentence becomes HundredLetter Sen… or something like that. Here is the select statement from my stored procedure. I’m kinda stuck from here. The Select TOP(1) Description is where I want to do the truncation.

SELECT      [TI].[TicketID]
        ,   CAST([TI].[Subject] AS VARCHAR(100)) [Subject]
        ,   [TA].[DueDate]
        ,   CAST(
                    (   SELECT 
                        TOP(1)      SUBSTRING(Description, 0, 100)
                        FROM        Comment 
                        WHERE       TicketID = [TI].[TicketID] 
                        ORDER BY    CommentDate DESC
                    ) AS VARCHAR(100)
                ) AS [Description]
FROM        [dbo].[Ticket]      [TI]
INNER JOIN  [dbo].[Task]        [TA] 
ON          [TI].[TicketID]     = [TA].[TicketID]
INNER JOIN  [dbo].[Task_Status] [TS] 
ON          [TA].[StatusID]     = [TS].[StatusID]
WHERE       [TI].[IsDeleted]    = 0 
AND         [TS].[IsDeleted]    = 0
AND         [TS].[Status]       = 'Open'
AND         [TI].[AssigneeView] IS NULL
AND         [TI].[AssignedTo]   = @AssignedTo

Answer 1

What will work is something like –

SELECT CASE 
           WHEN (LEN(Table1.LongText) < 100) THEN Table1.LongText
           ELSE SUBSTRING(Table1.LongText,1, 97) + '...'
       END AS [Description]
FROM Table1;