Question

I’m trying to make a query that selects the first row that is completely full and has the inputs value some where in the row otherwise it doesn’t pull anything. Here is what I’ve made up so far:

CASE WHEN `name_1` != '' and `name_2` != '' and `name_3` != ''  and `name_4` = 'Jimmy' THEN (SELECT`name_1`,`name_2`,`name_3`,`name_4` FROM `names`) end
CASE WHEN `name_1` != '' and `name_2` != '' and `name_4` != ''  and `name_3` = 'Jimmy' THEN (SELECT`name_1`,`name_2`,`name_3`,`name_4` FROM `names`) end
CASE WHEN `name_1` != '' and `name_4` != '' and `name_3` != ''  and `name_2` = 'Jimmy' THEN (SELECT`name_1`,`name_2`,`name_3`,`name_4` FROM `names`) end
CASE WHEN `name_4` != '' and `name_2` != '' and `name_3` != ''  and `name_1` = 'Jimmy' THEN (SELECT`name_1`,`name_2`,`name_3`,`name_4` FROM `names`) end

That returns the error:

1064 – You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use
near ‘CASE WHEN name_1 != ” and name_2 != ” and name_3 != ”
and name_4 = ” at line 1

So obviously it’s written wrong, so what exactly is wrong with it? and am I doing this the right way?

Answer 1

Your statements must begin with some sort of DML word (SELECT, UPDATE, CALL, DO…). That being said, your table is not normalized, as you should not have four columns for names but rather 2 columns perhaps (name, name_value).

The correct syntax for using CASE would look like:

SELECT
    CASE
        WHEN name_1 <> '' AND name_2 <> '' AND name_3 <> '' AND name_4 = 'Jimmy'
            THEN some_column
        WHEN ...
            THEN ...
    END AS column
FROM names

From reading your post, it appears you are trying to arrive at the first non-empty field. You can try something like this:

SELECT name_1, name_2, name_3, name_4
FROM names
WHERE (name_1 <> '' AND name_2 <> '' AND name_3 <> '' AND name_4 = 'Jimmy') OR
    (name_1 <> '' AND name_2 <> '' AND name_4 <> '' AND name_3 = 'Jimmy') OR
    ...