Question

I’m trying to get column names from a table. I want to supply the row id and I want only the column names for which the value of that column for the specific row (identified by the id) is “true” (my table has a bunch of boolean fields).

I want something like:

SELECT COLUMN_NAME 
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
    WHERE COLUMN_NAME.value = true
        AND TABLE_THE_COLUMN_IS_FROM.id = "some_id"

Where .value would be variable, basically checking each column to see if it were true.

I know I can just get the row’s values and iterate through, returning only those with value true, but I wanted to see if there is a way to do it all in one step. Thanks in advance to anyone who knows!

Answer 1

There is no means in one query to dynamically scan through the table’s schema and inspect its values. The best way to achieve what you want is the one you suggested: query for the row client-side and then cycle through the columns searching for the values you seek. The other alternative is to query for the table schema using the INFORMATION SCHEMA views client-side, build a SQL statement with a where clause that looks for a True value in all the boolean columns, execute that and inspect the results.