Question

Not sure how to describe this so I will show example:

table PAGES

id      int
parent  int
name    nvarchar
status  tinyint

table PAGES_MODULES

id          int 
id_parent   int
module_type nvarchar
module_id   int
status      int

One page can have more than one linked modules. Example records:

id    parent    name     status
1     -1        Xyz      1
2     -1        Yqw      1

id    id_parent    module_type    module_id     status
1     1            ARTICLE        1             1
2     1            GALLERY        2             1
3     2            CATEGORY       3             1

What I need is to create select which will not return 2 results if I do select left join page_modules.

I would like to have select which returns linked modules as this:

id    parent    name     status    modules
1     -1        Xyz      1         ARTICLE GALLERY
2     -1        Yqw      1         CATEGORY

Is that possible?

Thanks.

UPDATE

I have tried COALESE, CROSS APPLY and SELECT within SELECT methods and came to these conclusions:

http://blog.feronovak.com/2011/10/multiple-values-in-one-column-aka.html

Hope I can publish these here, not meaning to spam or something.

Answer 1

You’d need to create a custom aggregate function that could concatenate the strings together, there is no built-in SQL Server function that does this.

You can create a custom aggregate function (assuming your using the latest version of SQL) using a .Net assembly. Here’s the MS reference on how to do this (the example in the article is actually for a CONCATENATE function just like you require): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182741.aspx