Question

So I have a checkboxlist on an ASP.NET form. I need the IDs of the selected checkboxes as part of an IN clause in a stored procedure (SQL Server 2008). Quite straightforward really – let’s say the user selects 1, 2, 4, 7, then my procedure would ask for values where TranCode IN (1,2,4,7). Since I can’t do a dynamic IN statement, and I don’t want to build the query dynamically, I thought XML would be a good choice.

I’m building the XML string thusly in VB.NET – <chargecode><refnum>1</refnum><refnum>2</refnum></chargecode>, etc. TranCode and RefNum represent the same fields, they are just named differently between the transaction table and description table, so I can change refnum to something else in my XML if need be, but I’m definitely going to have to use TranCode for the comparison column.

In my stored procedure I’ve declared an XML variable called @ChargeCodesXML, which will contain the XML string passed in from VB.NET. Basically all I need to do is pull all the refnum fields out of the XML file for comparison against TranCode. The procedure has several joins, some aggregate functions, group bys, etc., but basically I want something like

SELECT * FROM SomeTable WHERE TranCode IN (SELECT RefNum FROM MyXMLFile)  

I’ve been searching around and have seen many complex XML queries, but nothing as simple as what I need, so I’m kind of overwhelmed by the examples I’m seeing. Can someone please tell me how to modify my proc for this very simple comparison?

Thanks!
Mike

Answer 1

SELECT * 
FROM SomeTable 
WHERE TranCode IN (
                  SELECT T.N.value('(./text())[1]', 'int')
                  FROM @ChargeCodesXML.nodes('/chargecode/refnum') AS T(N)
                  )