Question

Please help me with this. I am totally stuck. I have coders block or something.

I have the following table

ID     Name        Cost     Included
----   ----------  -------  ----------
1      Package1    10.00    Yes
2      Package2    20.00    No
3      Package3    20.00    Yes

I would like to crosstab this information, to display like the following example,there will be more columns in the table.

Type        Package1     Package2       Package3
-----       ------------ -----------    ----------
Name        Package1     Package2       Package3
Cost        10.00        20.00          30.00
Included    Yes          No             Yes

Answer 1

It seems to me that you are trying to build a product comparison list. If this is true, you might unpivot the table first and then join individual records together.

The ‘transponded’ part unpivots the columns. All columns must be of compatible types or converted to one. I choose varchar(100). transponded returns table with three columns, ID from ProductInfo, Type as column name and Value as value of corresponding column.

Select part joins together info on as many product as demanded by adding another left join transponded tn on t1.Type = tnType and tn.ID = @parametern. This part seems as a hassle, but when I tried to do this part with pivot I failed to get column in proper order – pivot sorted names in Type. It would however demand dynamic sql generation. This solution is fixed providing that you add enough joins for maximum products you wish to compare at once. I belive it would not be over 5.

=1, =2 and =3 should be replaced by parameters. The query should be hosted in stored procedure.

; with transponded as 
(
  select ID, Type, Value
    from 
    (
      select ID, 
             Name, 
             cast (Cost as varchar(100)) Cost, 
             cast (case when Included = 1 then 'Yes' else 'No' end as varchar(100)) Included
        from ProductInfo
    ) p
      unpivot (Value for Type in (Name, Cost, Included) ) a
)
select t1.Type, 
       t1.Value Product1, 
       t2.Value Product2, 
       t3.Value Product3
  from transponded t1
  left join transponded t2
         on t1.Type = t2.Type
        and t2.id = 2
   left join transponded t3
     on t1.Type = t3.Type
    and t3.id = 3
  where t1.id = 1

In short, transpond one record at time and join to another transponded record by Type column.

Oh, and here is a Sql Fiddle playground.